Rx: Conversations about Medicine and Writing Featuring Lakshmi Krishnan and Lenny Grant in Conversation with Johns Hopkins's Jeremy Greene

Description

To practice medicine is to understand that writing is a key tool in the medical toolkit. Whether through the narrative art of diagnosis, or the therapeutic power of expressive writing, writing frames interactions and shapes how patients and providers see themselves and each other. In a landscape shaped by technological developments such as the integration of artificial intelligence in electronic health record systems and shifting social and political dynamics, medicine's scripts continue to evolve. Come explore how the written word informs and illuminates the practice of medicine today.

A reception will follow the event in the Gilman Atrium.

Presenters:

Lakshmi Krishnan is a physician, cultural historian of medicine, and founding director of Medical Humanities at Georgetown University. Her research explores how medical knowledge is constructed and applied across different scales—from diagnosis to pandemic responses—and how cultural practices and professional identities shape these processes. (photo credit: Tina Krohn)

Lenny Grant is an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University and the founder of the Resilience Writing Project. He works in the rhetorical history of psychiatry, science communication, and the health humanities, connecting embodied experiences of health and wellness to the knowledge work of the medical sciences. (photo credit: Jeremy Brinn)

Jeremy Greene is a professor of medicine and the history of medicine and director of the Institute of the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His research explores the ways in which medical technologies come to influence our understandings of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal, on personal, regional, and global scales.