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Upcoming Seminars & Events

Seminars will take place live and in person on Wednesdays,

2:30PM – 4:00PM

Room 101, 3647 Peel Street

Seminar and Events - Spring 2024

January 24, 2024 Photo Shireen Hamza

Shireen Hamza, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Science in Human Culture, Northwestern University

The Proximity of Masculinity: Gender, Space, and Medical Authority in Medieval Islam

February 21, 2024 Eric Plemons Photo

Eric Plemons, University of Arizona

The Margaret Lock Seminar

What to Make of Me: penile and uterine transplant and the surgical future of sex

At the turn of the 21^st century, surgeons announced a new use for transplant technology. No longer focused exclusively on vital organs that are transplanted to save recipients’ lives, transplantation could also be used for non-vital body parts meant to “enhance” their lives. The first of these “life-enhancing transplants,” or vascularized composite allografts (VCAs), replaced lost hands, arms, and faces, and were motivated by a desire to improve recipients’ quality of life by restoring capacities that, while not needed to stay alive, advocates argued were necessary to live well. The newest life-enhancing, non-vital organs to be transplantable are uteruses and penises. Like other VCAs, the transplantation of these organs aims to improve recipients’ quality of life and, for the first time in the history of modern organ transplant, the quality of life they describe is a distinctly gendered one. While current practice relies on the explicit value of male virility and female maternity, efforts that center transgender desires and capacities may signal a very different future. In this talk, I explore the development and practice of penile and uterine transplant and consider the ethical and medical implications of ongoing efforts to incorporate transgender bodies as donors and recipients of these uniquely valuable body parts.

March 13, 2024 Scott Podolsky Photo

Scott Podolsky, Harvard University

The Dr. Martin A. Entin Lecture in the History of Medicine

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Racism, and Remembrance

William Osler considered Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) "the most successful combination which the world has ever seen, of the physician and man of letters." This talk examines the shifting depiction of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., as well as Holmes's evolving considerations of hereditary determinism and race over the course of the nineteenth century, as a test case concerning the evolving evaluation of historical figures in the history of medicine, from Holmes and Osler onward.