Historicizing Ageism in Medicine

Lara Keuck

This talk discusses what the history of ageism can tell us about epistemic injustice in medicine. Keuck exemplifies the complicated relationship between ageism and medicine with respect to the history of an age-related disease, Alzheimer’s disease. Her talk closes with reflections on how this perspective raises questions about current employments of age for the stratification of risk groups in present-day medicine in general and for anti-Corona measures in particular.

Lara Keuck’s research lies at the intersection of history of science and philosophy of medicine. She holds a Branco Weiss Fellowship of ETH Zurich and leads a junior research group at Humboldt University Berlin on “Learning from Alzheimer’s Disease: A History of Biomedical Models of Mental Illness.” In 2021, she will move to the MPIWG to start a new Max Planck Research Group on “Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences.”

Centering Disability in a Pandemic

Aparna Nair

Worldwide, more than one billion people live with disabilities. Not only are people with disabilities dying in disproportionately large numbers relative to non-disabled people, COVID-19 is also likely to swell the ranks of the disabled, as people who survive are often left with debilitating, long-term illnesses. Yet, this population is comparatively invisible in scholarship on COVID-19, especially relative to race and age. In this talk, Nair makes an argument for centering disability in our understanding of the pandemic.

Aparna Nair is currently Assistant Professor at the History of Science department in the University of Oklahoma. Her work examines the relationship between disability and colonialism in British India; the histories of public health (quarantine/vaccination) in India; epilepsy, gender and personhood in modern south India, as well as the representations of disability and chronic illness in popular culture. She is currently putting the finishing touches on her manuscript, titled Fungible Bodies: Disability Histories of British India, 1850–1950, for the University of Illinois Press' Disability History Series.