Seminars will take place live and in person on Wednesdays
2:30PM – 4:00PM
Room 101, 3647 Peel Street
Seminars and Events - Winter 2026
Department Seminar
January 21, 2026 [POSTPONED]
Elise Burton (University of Toronto)
“A Gene That Tells the Parsi Story:” Medical Genetics and Transnational Community Identity
A deficiency of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) is one of the world’s most common inherited enzyme disorders. While individuals with G6PD deficiency can be found across the globe, in some locales, it has become a genetic marker signifying communal identity. This talk explores the history of medical genetic research on the Parsi communities of India from the 1950s to the early 2000s, showing how this research shaped Parsis’ sense of relationship to their ancestral homeland in Iran and the Zoroastrians who remained there. Between the 1960s and 1980s, G6PD deficiency emerged as the condition that dominated Parsi discourses around genetic counseling, population health, and migration history between Iran and India. I examine how the gene for G6PD deficiency came to be perceived as “a gene that tells the Parsi story,” considered a biological confirmation of the community’s origins as well as a medical liability connected to the community’s historical strategies for survival.
Margaret Lock Seminar
February 4, 2026
Emily Yates-Doerr (Oregon State University)
“The Biologies of Memory: Generational half-life and the Inheritance of Affliction”
In September 1954, twenty-one-year-old Minnie Doerr developed sudden-onset lymphoma – one of several cancer cases reported in her small South Dakota town that fall. Her family and neighbors blamed nuclear testing, pointing to three days of red dust that had blanketed their farming community the previous summer. Seventy years later, memories of this cancer cluster continue to feed into distrust of federal authority and scientific expertise. This talk, based on archival and family ethnography, situates the story of Minnie's premature death within sciences linking ionizing radiation to cancer. By comparing the biologies of history (Landecker 2016) to present-day controversies about the safety of radiation exposure, the talk illustrates how memory embeds itself in bodies and communities. I conclude by discussing what Minnie’s short life can teach us about the entanglement of rumors and truth, and point to how situating biologies (Lock 1995, Niewöhner and Lock 2018) can reshape the landscape of biopolitics.
Dr. Martin A. Entin Lecture in the History of Medicine
March 11, 2026
Pablo F. Gómez (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
"The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality"
This talk examines how early Atlantic slave trading communities made human corporeality articulable with a new set of ideas about finance, facts, objectivity, and measurable risk that emerged in the early modern era. These communities drew on centuries of legal, commercial, financial, and maritime material customs and ideas. Through their violent procedures, Iberian Atlantic slave trading communities abstracted and assimilated groups of human bodies to numbers. They did so to protect their financial interests rather than caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks. The model for understanding human bodies these communities created foreshadows and shares basic notions with those sustaining the intellectual edifice of disciplines as varied as political arithmetic, economics, population health, demographics, epidemiology, and contemporary biomedicine.
Roundtable
April 1, 2026
2:30pm - 5:00pm
McIntyre Medical Building, Room 208/9
3655 Promenade Sir William Osler
McGill Downtown Campus
Uncomfortable Remains: A roundtable on discomfort in the medical museum
Medical museums provoke strong emotional responses—responses that sharpen in the presence of human remains, now widely characterized as uncomfortableor as difficult collections. Collections of uncomfortable remains compel medical museums to reflect critically on their pasts and to confront the difficult choices woven into practices of care, interpretation, and display.a
The SSoM roundtable Uncomfortable Remains treats this unease not as something to resolve or avoid, but as a starting point for conversation. Rather than asking what makes human remains uncomfortable in museum settings, we ask: what can be done with that discomfort? Should difficult, uncomfortable histories be shown in museums? Can unease open up new ways of learning or reflecting? Can curiosity, learning experiences, and discomfort coexist in the same visitor, at the same moment? And what, more broadly, feels uncomfortable about the experience of discomfort?
Participants:
Erin McLeary, Senior Director of Collections & Research, Mütter Museum
Arizona O’Neill, Illustrator, author of Opioids and Organs
Cara Krmpotich, Professor of Museum Studies, University of Toronto
Richard Fraser, Director, Maude Abbott Medical Museum, McGill University
Moderated by Hugo Rueda Ramírez, Post-Doctoral Researcher, SSoM
Poster: 
Roundtable Poster April 1 2026
Writing on Medicine in Climates of Controversy
April 22, 2026 1:00 pm -
Thomson Hall Ballroom, 3rd floor
3650 Rue McTavish
Histories of Medicine: Workshop in honour of George Weisz
May 13, 2026
Thomson Hall Ballroom, 3rd floor
3650 Rue McTavish
Seminars and Events - Fall 2025
Department Seminar: 
September 3, 2025
Madhukar Pai (McGill University)
Reimagining global health in an era of polycrisis and nationalism
Book Launch: 
September 18, 2025, Lobby 3647, 4:00pm
Bruner Strasser and Thomas Schlich (McGill University)
The Mask - A History or Breathing Bad Air
Comments by Thomas Schlich (SSoM), Ramona Rodrigues (Ingram School of Nursing), Jill Baumgartner (McGill Centre for Climate Change and Health), Prativa Baral (Dept. of Global and Public Health)
Book Launch: 
October 15, 2025, Lobby 3647, 4:00pm
Laurence Kirmayer (McGill University)
Healing and the Invention of Metaphor - Toward a Poetics of Illness Experience
Department Seminar: 
October 22, 2025
Geoffroy Carpier (McGill University)
Staging early phase cancer trials on the spot: how institutional review boards navigate the interface of science and ethics
November 5, 2025 6:00PM
Kim TallBear (University of Minnesota)
THE INDIAN WHO REFUSES TO VANISH – RACE, GENOMICS, AND INDIGENOUS THRIVING
Location: Charles F. Martin Amphitheatre (room 504) McIntyre Building
Recent Scholarship Roundtable 
November 26, 2025
Krista Maxwell (University of Toronto) to discuss Indigenous Healing as Paradox: Re-Membering and Biopolitics in the Settler Colony (University of Alberta Press 2025)
With Tuyaa Montgomery (Anthropology, McGill), Wanda Gabriel (Social Work, McGill), Leslie Sabiston (Anthropology, McGill), Dennis C. Wendt (Education, McGill)
Previous Seminars and Events
Winter 2025
Department Seminar:
January 22, 2025
Sophie Bjork-James (Vanderbilt University)
Race and Abortion Politics in the US
This talk covers the racial politics of the pro-life movement from Roe v. Wade (1973) to the Dobbs decision (2022). In doing so, it explores how opposing abortion changed from a primarily Catholic position to become an evangelical one, uniting evangelical values voters and helping to reshape US politics nationally. Beginning in the 1970s, white evangelicals across the United States began to politically organize against abortion by framing fetuses as the most persecuted group in history. Using language like the “abortion holocaust” and “the Civil Rights issue of our time,” evangelicals attempted to turn abortion, rhetorically, into a new racial justice issue. This talk shows how race has remained central to abortion politics in the United States.
Margaret Lock Seminar 
February 5, 2025
Anthony Stavrianakis (CNRS)
"What’s therapeutic about a “club thérapeutique”? On the functions and effects of a particular form of institutional psychotherapy
Recent Scholarship Roundtable 
February 6, 2025
Anthony Stavrianakis (CNRS), to discuss Crucible of the Incurable: Facing ALS (Cornell University Press, 2024)
The Dr. Martin A. Entin Lecture in the History of Medicine 
March 12, 2025
Monica H. Green (Independent Scholar)
How Genetics Has Changed the History of the Black Death, And How History Has Changed Genetics
Leacock Building, room 232 (Senate room)
855 Sherbrooke St W
Themed Roundtable 
April 2, 2025 2:30 to 4:30pm
Place and Psyche
With Elena Vogman (Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar), Coline Fournout (McGill, Anthropology), Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (Cornell University), Ramzi Nimr (McGill, Anthropology), and Todd Meyers (Moderator: McGill, Social Studies of Medicine)
Recent Scholarship Roundtable 
April 23, 2025
Nancy Rose Hunt, to discuss Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness, Nancy Rose Hunt and Hubertus Büschel, editors (Duke University Press, 2024).
roundtable.psychiatric_contours.april_23.pdf
Book Launch 
May 1, 2025, Lobby 3647, 4:00pm
Edited by Rachel Elder and Thomas Schlich (McGill University)
Technology, Health and the Patient Consumer in the 20th Century
Panelists: Thomas Schlich, Rachel Elder, Lawrence Rosenberg, Cynthia L. Tang.
Book Launch:
May 7, 2025, Lobby 3647, 4:00pm
Todd Meyers (McGill University)
Gone Gone (Duke University Press, 2025).
Comments by Ramzi Nimr, Marie Lecuyer, and Setrag Manoukian.
Previous Seminars and Events
Fall 2024
Department Seminar:
September 11, 2024
Theresa Ventura, (Concordia University)
When Breast Isn't Best: Infant Mortality and the Undoing of Tropical Medicine in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898-1945
Department Seminar:
October 9, 2024
Simplice Ayangma Bonoho (Université de Montréal)
The WHO in Central Africa: History of International Health Colonialism (1956-2000)
November 6, 2024 6:00PM
Roger Kneebone (Imperial College London)
Medicine - the art of the expert performer. What clinicians can learn from the performing arts
The Jonathan C. Meakins Amphitheatre Room 521: McIntyre Building
November 27, 2024
Collections of Human Remains in the Medical Museum: Problematic Pasts, Challenging Futures
With Dominic Hall (Harvard, Warren Anatomical Museum), Catherine Turgeon (McGill, Redpath Museum), Annie Lussier (McGill, Redpath Museum), Richard Fraser (McGill, Maude Abbott Medical Museum), Alyssa Bader (McGill, Department of Anthropology) and Hugo Rueda (McGill, Social Studies of Medicine).
Faculty Council Room (M48)
Strathcona Anatomy and Dentristry Building
3640 Rue University