Call for Papers - "History of Medicine in Times of Crisis"
SGGMN Annual Conference 2025
24th October 2025
University of Zürich
Starting with the Covid-19 pandemic and culminating – so far – with the decision by the newly-elected United States administration to withdraw from the World Health Organisation, the 2020s appear set to be remembered as a decade of crisis in the history of health and medicine. A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, there is no shortage of millennial anxiety around the future of health, fuelled by the looming threat of antibiotic resistance, increasing mental health challenges, and anthropogenic environmental degradation, whether due to atmospheric pollution or microplastics. As well as generating new topics for future historical research, this delicate moment of global history also calls for historians of medicine to re-examine the contribution of our discipline to current understandings of past health crises, and of their implications for the present. Times of crises may enable us to reinterpret previously neglected episodes in the history of medicine.
While certain aspects of recent global health crises are certainly unprecedented – the speedy vaccination of large swathes of the world’s population within two years of the emergence of Covid-19 being one of them – others are not, as the modern history of influenza and AIDS demonstrate. This observation reminds us that health crises are always multifactorial and the product of long-term, endogenous trends as well as sudden, exogeneous shocks. By telling the story of crises past, highlighting the ruptures and continuities involved in their making, and questioning the concepts, methods, and actors mobilised to construct these stories, the history of medicine is well-equipped to contribute to one of today’s most pressing public debates.
This one-day conference aims to bring together scholars working on any aspect of the history of health in crises. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Health systems under authoritarian regimes – Apartheid, Capitalist and Communist-leaning dictatorships, National Socialism
- Issues of legitimacy and scientific expertise, fringe health theories, anti-vaccination campaigns
- Structural factors contributing to crises of healthcare systems and points of resilience and resistance (activism, advocacy, social movements),
- Health care during wars, natural disasters, famines,
- The unequally distributed burden of health crises based on age, disability, ethnicity, gender, pre-existing health conditions, religious and political beliefs, sexual orientation, socio-economic background.
We invite interested speakers to send an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short CV by 15th May 2025.
We particularly welcome proposals from early career-scholars, and encourage submissions in German, French and English.
Date of conference: Friday, 24th October 2025
Venue: University of Zürich
The conference organisers will cover the meals of registered participants.
To send your abstract, register for the conference, and for all queries, please email Dr. Lola Wilhelm (lola.wilhelm@uzh.ch).