Founding Director: Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, Ph.D.
Lakshmi Krishnan, M.D., Ph.D., is a cultural historian of medicine, medical humanities scholar, and physician. Born in Bombay, India, she grew up in England and the United States. Her research focuses on diagnosis and clinical reasoning, especially diagnostic health disparities. She is writing a cultural and intellectual history of diagnosis and detective practices—The Doctor and the Detective: A Cultural History of Diagnosis (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins University Press).
More broadly, she is engaged with the relationship between medicine and the humanities writ large. Areas of interest include health equity and the history of health disparities, intellectual history of medicine, 19th-century and early 20th-century literature and medicine, and cultural responses to illness. This interdisciplinary work seeks to recenter the experiences of marginalized communities, broaden the narrative canon, and promote health equity.
Dr. Krishnan earned her M.D. from Johns Hopkins and her DPhil (Ph.D.) in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She completed an Internal Medicine residency at Duke, where she was a Faculty Affiliate at the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, & History of Medicine, followed by a postdoctoral 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 practices hospital medicine. Her work has been nationally recognized through grants and awards from the Association of American Medical Colleges, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Academy of Communication in Healthcare and appears in The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, BMJ Medical Humanities, Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, and Modern Language Review, among others.
Featured media, scholarship, and events
News
Announcements, Scholarship
Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan, Founding Director of the Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University, co-authored a new JAMA Viewpoint titled “The New Clinician-Scholars—Dual Training in…
October 26, 2025
Past events
2nd Annual Medical Humanities Research Showcase
Congratulations to all our research fellows and graduating seniors for presenting your work at the Medical Humanities Research Showcase on April 25! Learn more about the senior capstone and research…
April 25, 2024
Past events
Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan Speaks at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Grand Rounds
On October 13th, Dr. Krishnan gave a talk at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center on Medical Detectives: A History of Diagnosis and the Stories Doctors Tell About Ourselves.…
October 13, 2023