Professor and Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine & Acting Department Chair (January–July 2024)
todd.meyers [at] mcgill.ca
Professor Meyers was trained in anthropology and public health science at Johns Hopkins University and studied studio arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine and teaches courses in the medical school and the Department of Anthropology. Professor Meyers is the author of All That Was Not Her (Duke University Press, 2022), Chroniques de la maladie chronique (Presses Universitaires de France, 2017) and The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy (University of Washington Press, 2013), and he is the co-author of Violence’s Fabled Experiment (with Richard Baxstrom, August Verlag, 2018), The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (with Stefanos Geroulanos, University of Chicago Press, 2018), Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (with Richard Baxstrom, Fordham University Press, 2016), and Experimente im individuum: Kurt Goldstein und die Frage des Organismus (with Stefanos Geroulanos, August Verlag, 2014). Alongside Nancy Rose Hunt and Achille Mbembe, he co-edits the Theory in Forms book series at Duke University Press.
Research Interests
Professor Meyers's research moves between the social study and history of medicine, clinical ethnography, and anthropological approaches to the study of visual culture. His forthcoming book, Gone Gone (Duke University Press), traces the swirl of grief that follows fatal overdose in Montreal. He is currently working on a long-term project that examines mental illness and the medicalization of hate-related violence in rural America, entitled The Sin Between Us, as well as a study of the visual culture of wounding, entitled The Shape of Future Wounds (under contract, McGill-Queen’s University Press). Professor Meyers has received numerous awards and fellowships, including an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship, a Residency Research Fellowship at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Research at the University of Michigan, and the Ruth L. Kirschstein Individual Fellowship/NIH/National Institute of Drug Abuse
Selected Publications
Todd Meyers, “Grief, but different,” The Lancet 401 (10387): 1490-1491, May 06, 2023.
Editor, A Cultural History of Medicine in the Modern Age, volume 6 in A Cultural History of Medicine, Roger Cooter, general editor (Bloomsbury 2021).
Todd Meyers, “Déplorables,” in Le soin en première ligne, ouvrage coordonné par Frédéric Worms, Jean-Christophe Mino et Martin Dumont (Presses Universitaires de France, 2021), 155-164.
Editor, Pamela Reynolds’s The Uncaring, Intricate World: A Field Diary, Zambezi Valley, 1984-85 (Duke University Press, 2019).
Editor, Hervé Guibert’s Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary (Fordham University Press, 2016).
Courses Given
ANTH615 (Mess, Winter 2023, Grief & Horror, Winter 2024)
PIAT Med4 (The Patient in the First Person, Winter 2024)
Research Fundamentals 1-2 (Narrative Medicine, Fall 2021-Fall 2022)
PIAT Med4 (Addiction Worlds, Winter 2022, Winter 2023)
HSSM605 Medical Anthropology Seminar (Things that Linger, Winter 2022)
ANTH438 Topics in Medical Anthropology (Aftermaths, Afterlives, Fall 2020)
ANTH302 New Horizons in Medical Anthropology (Clinics, Winter 2021) (The Patient, Winter 2022, Fall 2023)