AGM & The SSHM Lecture 2025 with Jeremy Greene

[Please note that the Society for the Social History of Medicine's Annual General Meeting precedes the lecture from 4:00pm (UK time). The SSHM Lecture is expected to start at approximately 4.30pm].

Wasted medicines and medical wastes: Notes from the trash-heap of medical history

SSHM is delighted to welcome Jeremy Greene to deliver the 2025 SSHM Annual Lecture which focuses on everyday technologies of health and medicine in the 20th century. It follows a series of pills, capsules, syringes, and diagnostic test-kits through spaces of production, circulation, consumption, and disposal, and lingers on practices of use, abuse, re-use, and refusal that entwine the material histories of these devices the complex agency of patients, caregivers, health practitioners, and a host of other stakeholders who shape their use-value in unexpected ways. Along the way Jeremy will try to portray some sort of retrospective coherence over a career that has not always seemed coherent in prospect, emphasizing what can be gained by focusing on everyday objects as points of departure for ethnographic as well as historical investigation. Drawing a line between the first paper he presented at SSHM as a second-year graduate student (on the different ways to understand why patients don’t take the medicines as prescribed) and his current book project (on the histories and futures of disposable medical technologies), the talk will reflect on modes of historical inquiry drawn from sources otherwise consigned to the dustbin.

Jeremy Greene is the William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he co-directs the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine and co-edits the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. His current research project, Syringe Tides: Disposable Technologies and the Making of Medical Waste focuses on the scientific, social, and economic basis of the shift towards single-use plastics in hospitals and clinics that have made the health care industry one of the largest carbon-emitting and plastic waste-producing sectors of the global economy, and what might be done to correct this.

The SSHM Lecture hears from previous winners of the Roy Porter Prize and its predecessors. The Roy Porter Prize is an essay prize for postgraduates and very recent graduates from their postgraduate studies. We invite the speaker at this annual lecture to reflect on the place of their entry in their career. Speakers will also draw on their experience to offer insights into the work and research, methodologies and tools for and within the field of the social history of medicine. The event is also designed to alert potential entrants and academics supervising potential entrants to the submission date for the next round of the Roy Porter Prize—the forthcoming deadline for the 2025/6 round, is 5pm UK time on 1 February 2026. For further information around the cash, plenary speaker slot, mentoring and Masterclass place prizes, as well as eligibility criteria and the entry form, please visit our webpage.