Seminars will take place live and in person on Wednesdays, 2:30PM – 4:00PM, Room 101, 3647 Peel Street
Please note: Other events, including workshops, symposia, and lectures, maybe have different times and locations.
Seminars and Events - Winter 2026
Department Seminar
September 9, 2026
Victoria-Oana Lupașcu (Université de Montréal)
Lost in the Hospital: Super-Structures and the (Un)attainability of Care 
This presentation employs the concept of sickening landscapes (Qu, 2024) to think about health care and justice in contexts of ultra development. It understands hospitals as the intersection between the state and the individual and questions notions of scientific modernity, capitalist technological advancement in medicine and health care services and their alienating features when implemented, in theory, to serve underrepresented and marginalized groups of people. The presentation underscores the simultaneity of therapeutic (Dunkley 2009) and sickening (Varley and Varma, 2021) aspects found in hospitals as captured by Chinese contemporary cinematography.
The film H6 (2021) directed by Ye Ye makes visible the daily, often neglected, hurdles patients face in a large, very modern Shanghai hospital and highlights mundane aspects that constitute significant obstacles for professional, well-delivered and efficacious care. From finding the right wing in a super-hospital that offers more than fifty elevators to registering and paying at high-tech kiosks, these signs of infrastructural modernity alienate the ageing population and render services unattainable to the poor, the aging, the illiterate and the unaccompanied chronically ill.
SSoM Start of the Term Party
September 23, 2026
4:00-6:00pm
SSoM, 3647 Peel Street, Room 102
Department Seminar
October 21, 2026
Elise Burton (University of Toronto)
Japanese Medical Aid, Iranian Blood, and the Diplomacy of Genetic Racialism 
In 1966, Japan’s Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency (OTCA) established an office for “medical cooperation,” which recruited Japanese medical schools to participate in international aid projects to strengthen scientific, as well as political, ties with countries across Asia and Africa. Gifu University Medical School was selected to work in Iran, launching a flow of Japanese personnel and scientific equipment to the laboratories of Tehran University. While Iranian scientists were primarily interested in receiving technical aid, Japanese scientists were eager to conduct joint fieldwork projects. The organization of a joint expedition to northern Iran in 1972 exposed a series of tensions in the Japanese-Iranian collaboration. The team eventually collected blood samples from thousands of Iranian villagers to screen them for pathologies. Then, most of these blood samples were shipped to Japan, where they had a surprising afterlife. Circulating through laboratories in Tokyo, Nagasaki, and Osaka, the Iranian blood was incorporated into a research project to analyze genetic variation within Japan’s own population, and data from the samples featured in Japanese publications hypothesizing about the origins of the Japanese race. Meanwhile, in publications with Iranian co-authors, the meaning of the genetic data had to be re-negotiated according to Iranian understandings of racial identity.
49th Annual Osler Lecture
November 4, 2026
Arthur Kleinman (Harvard University)
Memory, Loss, Mourning and Renewal: The Care of Memories at Life’s End: Reflections on an Intellectual Career, a Final Book, and a Long, Unfinished Personal Journey 
In 2026, I retired after 50 years at Harvard during which I, along with colleagues, built the Medical Anthropology program, developed my own research trajectory, advanced social theory, and contributed to the practical development of clinical programs in medical anthropology, social medicine, global mental health, cultural psychiatry and the medical humanities. This lecture draws on that broad and multi-sided background to describe a final book project that centers on the care of memories. To understand that subject requires a re-exploration of memory, loss, mourning, and renewal based on ethnographic and clinical research as well as deeply personal experiences. This project is in midstream, and so the lecture will take the audience into the questions, insights, obstacles, and potential for further development that represent where I find myself today.
Writing on Medicine in Climates of Controversy
November 5, 2026
Thomson House Ballroom
3650 Rue McTavish
Cornelius Borck (University of Lübeck)
Nicole C. Nelson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Fiona Kenney (McGill, Architecture)
Cynthia Lazzaroni (McGill, Anthropology)
Department Seminar:
January 20, 2027
Mary X. Mitchell (Rutgers SAS-Newark | University of Toronto)
6th Annual Margaret Lock Seminar
February 3, 2027
Aidan Seale-Feldman (University of Notre Dame)
14th Annual Dr. Martin A. Entin Lecture in the History of Medicine
March 10, 2027
Hannah Murphy (King’s College London)
SSoM, 3647 Peel Street, Room 102
2:30-4:00pm
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 Dentistry Building
3640 Rue University