Lakshmi Krishnan is a cultural historian of medicine, medical humanities scholar, and physician. She is Founding Director of the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative, with a primary appointment in Medicine and affiliate joint appointments in the Department of English and Georgetown Humanities Initiative.
Her research explores how medical knowledge is constructed and applied across different scales. Her current work focuses on diagnosis and clinical reasoning, exploring how diagnosis shapes medical knowledge and professional identity and intersects with novel technologies, including artificial intelligence. Her forthcoming book, The Doctor and the Detective: A Cultural History of Diagnosis (Johns Hopkins University Press), traces connections between medical diagnosis and detective fiction from 19th century Paris to 20th century Harlem. This work was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and has significance in responding to emerging disease or medical mystery on a global scale, critically examining diagnostic practice and technological innovation, and addressing the pressing problems of diagnostic disparities and diagnostic error in patient care.
She views the humanities and social sciences as key interlocutors of clinical and public health practice, applying this framework to contemporary and historical pandemics as well as diagnosis. She has given over 50 keynote addresses, invited lectures, plenaries, grand rounds, and conference presentations at universities, medical centers, and international organizations. Her research appears in leading journals including JAMA, The BMJ, The Lancet, and Annals of Internal Medicine, has been presented at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and featured in outlets such as STAT News, the History Channel, Voice of America, and Science News.
Dr. Krishnan earned her MD from Johns Hopkins, her DPhil (PhD.) in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, completed internal medicine residency at Duke, and a fellowship in General Internal Medicine and History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. She is board certified in Internal Medicine and a member of the American College of Physicians, and in addition to her university appointments, practices inpatient medicine at the MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. Her work has been supported by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Academy of Communication in Healthcare, and the National Institutes of Health. Along with Dean Dana Williams (Howard) she is principal investigator on a multimillion dollar Mellon Foundation grant establishing a Georgetown Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice in DC.
Dr. Krishnan actively mentors undergraduates, graduate, and medical students in research at the intersection of humanities and health, with a special focus on pandemics, diagnosis, artificial intelligence, and the cultural dimensions of clinical practice.