Lakshmi Krishnan is a physician and literary scholar at Georgetown University, where she is Founding Director of Medical Humanities. In 2026-27, she is the Jeffrey S. and Margaret Mais Padnos Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she is completing The Doctor and the Detective, the first book-length cultural history of diagnosis and detective fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press).
Her work spans history of medicine, literary studies, and clinical research, critically examining diagnosis, medical knowledge, and technological innovation—how doctors know, how they think they know, and what impact those stories have—including the diagnostic imagination in the age of artificial intelligence, and the pressing issues of diagnostic disparities and diagnostic error in patient care. She has also published widely on historical and contemporary pandemics. Her scholarship appears in leading medical and humanities journals, including JAMA, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and BMJ Medical Humanities, has been presented at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and featured in STAT News, the History Channel, Voice of America, and Science News. She is a frequent contributor to The BMJ, where she writes cultural criticism on medicine in fiction, film, and history, and she publishes The Workup , a Substack on medicine and culture.
A dual-trained clinician-scholar, Dr. Krishnan earned her MD from Johns Hopkins and her DPhil (PhD) in English Literature from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, completed her internal medicine residency at Duke, and a fellowship in General Internal Medicine and the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. She is board certified in Internal Medicine and practices inpatient medicine at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. With Dean Dana Williams of Howard University, she is principal investigator on a multimillion-dollar Mellon Foundation grant establishing the Georgetown-Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice . She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, as well as grants and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the National Institutes of Health, and the Academy of Communication in Healthcare.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Assistant Professor, SOM - Medicine Academic Department
- Secondary
- Director, College - Department of English