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
In the Press, Media, Media and Scholarship
The Georgetown-Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice hosted its inaugural fireside chat, bringing together scholars and storytellers to explore health narratives within Black…
January 17, 2026
In the Press, Media, Media and Scholarship
When AI Challenges the Diagnosis: What History and Technology Reveal
A recent STAT analysis examining studies in which tools like ChatGPT outperform physicians in certain diagnostic tasks has sparked renewed discussion about what diagnosis means in medical practice.…
January 17, 2026
In the Press, Media, Media and Scholarship
Exploring the Intersection Between Writing and Medicine
Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan from Georgetown University joined Dr. Lenny Grant and Dr. Jeremy Greene at Johns Hopkins University for Rx: Conversations about Medicine and Writing, an interdisciplinary event…
January 17, 2026