Seminars will take place live and in person on Wednesdays,
2:30PM – 4:00PM
Room 101, 3647 Peel Street
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).
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
Book Launch 
May 7, 2025, Lobby 3647, 4:00pm
Todd Meyers (McGill University)
Gone Gone (Duke University Press, 2025).
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
Would you like join our seminar list? E-mail us at ssom [at] mcgill.ca