Welcome and Plenary SessionMary Fissell, AAHM President, presiding
Rebecca Kluchin and Johanna Schoen, Co-Chairs, 2025 Program Committee
David Jones, Co-Chair, 2025 Local Arrangement Committee
Ahistoric Administration: The Crisis of Historical Expertise in U.S. Health Policymaking, Politics, and Emergency ResponseChair: Allan Brandt, Harvard University
Jason Chernesky, former Food and Drug Administration Historian
Evelynn Hammonds, Harvard University
Osaremen Okolo, Harvard University
Susan Reverby, Wellesley College Emerita
Keith Wailoo, Princeton University
This roundtable is prompted by an emergency: the unique political moment we presently find ourselves in and its urgent implications for history, medicine, and public health. Each participant in this roundtable has had a unique and direct relationship with the federal government: working as a historian within a critical federal agency; serving in the White House Office of the COVID-19 Response during the height of the pandemic; conducting groundbreaking archival research that prompted a Presidential apology; and serving on expert governmental panels and committees on the most pressing issues in health equity, biomedicine, and beyond. In this welcome plenary, panelists will place our current political moment within a broader arc of the history of medicine and public health; untangle the relationship that historians of medicine and public health have maintained with public health practitioners and health policymakers over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and vocalize the implications of tacit silence from historians of medicine and public health on current issues in health policy, public health, and health equity. Most critically, this roundtable aims to begin to identify tangible methods for historians to engage with local, state, and federal government—offering an important frame for the entirety of the 100th anniversary meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine.
