Jeremy Greene, MD

Professional Titles

• William H. Welch Professor of the History of Medicine
• Director, Department of the History of Medicine
• Director, Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine

Primary Academic Title

Professor of History of Medicine

Background

Additional Academic Titles

Professor of Medicine

Research Interests

Global health, History of disease, Pharmaceuticals, Therapeutics, Twentieth century clinical medicine

Lab Website

Jeremy Greene Lab - Lab Website

• Research in the Jeremy Greene Lab focuses on the history of disease and the ways that medical technologies affect our understanding of what it means to be sick, healthy, normal or abnormal. Particular areas of interest include 20th century clinical medicine, pharmaceuticals, medical technology, medical anthropology and global health.

Research Summary

I am broadly interested in the history of disease, and my research explores the ways in which medical technologies come to influence our understandings of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal.  In addition to directing the Institute of the History of Medicine, I am the founding Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Core Faculty in the Johns Hopkins Drug Access and Affordability Initiative, Associate Faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and hold joint appointments in the Department of History of Science and Technology and the Department of Anthropology at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. 

My first two books, Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease and Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine, (2007 and 2014, Johns Hopkins University Press) describe how the relationship of knowledge and practice, medical science and the pharmaceutical marketplace, and broader understandings of the relationship between medicine and public health can only be understood through understanding the complex histories of medical technologies (like pharmaceuticals) and the series of legislative, regulatory, clinical, and consumer decisions that guide their production, circulation, and consumption. My current book project, tentatively titled The Electronic Patient: Medicine and the Challenge of New Media (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press)  examines how changing expectations of instantaneous communications through electric, electronic, and digital media transformed the nature of medical practice and medical knowledge.  This research is focused on recapturing how seemingly mundane communications technologies have enabled and altered the production, circulation, and consumption of medical knowledge, from telegraph to text pager, telephone to telemedicine, fax machine to Facebook.  The present work has been supported by a  Faculty Scholars Fellowship from the Greenwall Foundation and a G13 Award from the National Library of Medicine.

PubMed

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/jeremy.greene.1/bibliography/public/

Selected Publications

• Greene JA, Lea AS. Digital futures past: The long arc of big data in medicine. N Engl J Med 2020; 381(5): 480-485

• Greene JA, Riggs K.  Why is there no generic insulin? Historical origins of a modern problem. NEJM 2015; 372:1171-5

• Greene JA. Do-it-yourself medical devices: Technology and empowerment in American health care. N Engl J Med 2016; 374: 305-9

• Jones DS, Greene JA, Duffin J, Harley Warner J.  Making the case for history in medical education. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences; 70(1):2015

• Kveim Lie AH, Greene JA. From Ariadne’s thread to the labyrinth itself: Nosology and the infrastructure of modern medicine. N Engl J Med 2020; 382 (13), 1273-1277

Courses & Syllabi

• History of Twentieth Century Biomedicine, SOM150.714
• Survey of Modern Medicine, 150.702

Honors

• Nicholas Davies Memorial Award, American College of Physicians
• Rachel Carson Prize, Society for the Social Studies of Science, 1/1/09

Professional Activities

Johns Hopkins University, Press Faculty Editorial Board