Lakshmi Krishnan is a cultural historian of medicine, medical humanities scholar, and physician. Born in Bombay, India, she grew up in England and the United States. She is Founding Director of the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative and holds a primary appointment in Medicine, affiliate joint appointments in the Department of English and Georgetown Humanities Initiative, and is affiliated with the Master's Program in Engaged and Public Humanities.
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). Sweeping from post-revolutionary Paris to 20th century Harlem, it argues that the medical practice of diagnosis and literary genre of detective fiction share an intellectual lineage which dictates medical knowledge, professional identity, and clinical practice. This work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and has significance in responding to emerging disease or medical mystery on a global scale, the diagnostic process in the face of new technologies, and the immediate problems of diagnostic error and bias.
She views the humanities and social sciences as key interlocutors of clinical and public health practice and has applied this framework to the COVID-19 pandemic and historical pandemics as well as diagnosis. She has appeared on outlets such as the History Channel, Voice of America, and Science News. Along with Dean Dana Williams (Howard) she is principal investigator on a multimillion dollar Mellon Foundation grant to establish a Georgetown Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice in DC.
Dr. Krishnan received an MD from Johns Hopkins and a DPhil (PhD.) 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, where she was a Fellow in the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine . 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 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.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Secondary
- Director, College - Department of English