History and Philosophy of Medicine

Lara Keuck leads the History and Philosophy of Medicine Group. She joined Bielefeld University in September 2022 to take up the inaugural Professorship for History and Philosophy of Medicine. The unique institutional set-up of this position as a bridge professorship implies that Professor Keuck is co-affiliated to the Department of Philosophy, the Department of History and the Medical School OWL. She is also involved in the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Science (I²SoS), and the Centre for Theories in Historical Research. Professor Keuck teaches history and philosophy of medicine to medical students, including co-teaching with the gender-sensitive medicine group, the interprofessional studies group, as well as the other medical humanities groups, namely ethics in medicine and law in medicine. At the Department of History and the Department of Philosophy, Professor Keuck supervises graduate students whose historical and philosophical work relates to medical topics.

Lara Keuck graduated in molecular biomedicine at Bonn University in 2008, receiving a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes throughout her studies. She then participated in a German-French PhD programme in History, Philosophy, and Ethics of Medicine at the University Medical Center Mainz and the Philosophy Department of the École normale supérieure in Paris, and completed her doctoral thesis Towards an Epistemology of Medical Classification Systems in 2012. Her research was awarded the 2012 Prize for Philosophy in Psychiatry of the German Association of Psychiatry DGPPN. In 2012-2015, she held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), and at the Institute of Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin (HU Berlin), where she worked on a project on blurred boundaries, from which grew a book on vagueness in psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2016). The ETH Zurich awarded her the prestigious Branco Weiss Fellowship in 2015. She used the funding to establish the junior research group "Learning from Alzheimer's Disease: A History of Biomedical Models of Mental Illness", which she led from 2015-2021 at the Department of History of HU Berlin. During this time, Lara Keuck was also a short-term visiting scholar at Princeton University, University of Exeter, and Université de Bordeaux. From 2021-2024, Lara Keuck lead an independent Max Planck Research Group on "Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences" at the MPIWG in Berlin. This group gave rise to several projects and working groups, including the open source Digital Humanities project Commoning Biomedicine that provides the first search engine for oral histories in biomedicine (https://combio.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ ), and the working group "Validation and Regulation in the Health and Human Sciences" that Professor Keuck co-organised with Professor Angela Creager (History Department, Princeton University) with whom she is currently working on a collective volume.

In 2020, Lara Keuck was elected to Die Junge Akademie, the young academy of Leopoldina and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She co-founded the working group Engaged Science that explores the boundaries between academic research and forms of political engagement. She was the first member of a young academy who was elected into the board of ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, in 2022 (re-elected in 2024). ALLEA is a central organisation in European policy advice, advocating for research integrity and inclusive and sustainable research environments.

Professor Keuck co-edits the journal History of Science and Humanities / Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. She is the Bielefeld representative of the PhilInBioMed network, and organises in this realm together with her colleagues Marie Kaiser (Philosophy of Science, Bielefeld) and Thomas Pradeu (Bordeaux) the 5th Conference of the network that brings together philosophers, biologists and medics (30 Sep-2 Oct, ZiF Bielefeld). Professor Keuck has been an external member of PhD committees in Paris (Sorbonne and ENS), Oslo and Geneva, and is a collaborator on several international and interdisciplinary projects, for instance at the Université de Tours and at Medicinsk Museion at Copenhagen.

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Dr. Alfred Freeborn is a historian of science and medicine whose research focuses on late-modern biological psychiatry. His work combines archival research, oral history and epistemological analysis to explain the nature of scientific progress in psychiatry over the twentieth-century. His current project is entitled Spectrum Politics: Making and Resisting Medical Collectives in the Era of Big Data and charts the rise of the spectrum concept in modern medicine from the perspectives of intellectual, social and political history.

Alfred received his BA in History and MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, before completing a doctorate at the Chair for the History of Science at the Humboldt University. He was a Research Scholar in the Research Group on Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences (Lara Keuck) and Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life (Etienne Benson) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. In 2024, he received the Early Career Prize of the History of the Human Sciences journal for his work on postwar methodological reforms in psychiatric diagnosis.

Together with Elizabeth Hughes, he was co-editer of the volume Biomedical Visions: Epistemology, Medicine and Art Practice (2025) published with Hatje Cantz. He recently co-edited a forthcoming Special Issue on Research Interviews in the History of Science for the Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte with Dr Hanna Worliczek. Alfred has taught courses on the history of psychiatry, big data and artificial intelligence at Birkbeck University of London, Humboldt University and Bard College Berlin.

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I hold a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg and a MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge, UK. Currently I pursue a degree in Medicine at the University of Leipzig. Since 2023 I am a research assistant in the AG History and Philosophy of Medicine

My academic field of interest is the Philosophy of Medicine and Psychiatry. I am especially interested in debates about legitimate and illegitimate roles of nonepistemic values in medical research and clinical practice. More specifically, my Master's thesis has focussed on this topic in relation to perverse financial incentives in the German DRG system of hospital reimbursement. Moreover, I am interested in philosophical questions around the development and application of clinical guidelines.

I am currently preparing for my MD dissertation here at the AG History and Philosophy of Medicine.

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I have been a doctoral student and research assistant in the History and Philosophy of Medicine working group since the beginning of 2024. In my doctoral project, supervised by Prof. Dr. Lara Keuck, I am investigating knowledge about skin and skin care at the blurred boundary between beauty and health.

My research interest lies particularly in the historical exploration of the unclear boundary between personal acts of beauty care, hygiene, and medically necessary treatments of the skin. More generally, I am interested in the knowledge that underlies everyday practices and its distinction from "specialized knowledge", especially scientific knowledge.

After studying biology and history in Bielefeld (B.Sc.), I studied History, Economics, and Philosophy of Science / Interdisciplinary Studies of Science (M.A.) in Bielefeld and Vienna. In my master's thesis, I dealt with the history of industrial cosmetic products in the second half of the 20th century in West Germany.

Research interests

• History of medicine and hygiene
• History of the cosmetics industry
• History of everyday knowledge
• History of objects
• History of science in the 19th and 20th centuries

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Nele Röttger holds a doctorate in philosophy and has been a research associate in the Research Group for the History and Philosophy of Science of Medicine since December 2024. In her research, she investigates the limits of medical knowledge in relation to the concept of expertise. The starting point is the assumption that one does not become an expert solely through the acquisition of knowledge or the acquisition of specific skills. Rather, being an expert also means shaping a social practice that includes scientific scepticism on the one hand and the attribution of trust and responsibility on the other. Both trust and responsibility are concepts that presuppose a reciprocal relationship between people. In this sense, experts are aware of the limits of their knowledge and recognise where their own expertise is contaminated by the expertise of others. This enables them to fulfil their scientific and social responsibility. At the same time, experts are dependent on structures within which they can assert themselves as experts.

Nele Röttger completed her doctorate at the Chair of Practical Philosophy at Bielefeld University on the concept of self-respect and the question of what it means to stand up for oneself and take responsibility. Nele Röttger also explores the question of the prerequisites for a responsible attitude in the context of healthcare as part of a philosophical training programme for clinical ethics consultants and healthcare professionals. The aim of this programme is to reflect on philosophical concepts in exchange with various experts in order to understand and shape the respective areas of action and the associated boundaries.

Nele Röttger is a member of the coordination team of JMED (Young Medical Ethics Network), an interdisciplinary forum for early and mid-career researchers at the AEM (Academy for Ethics in Medicine). She trained as a nurse and is a certified ethics counsellor (AEM, K1).

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Sasha Bergstrom-Katz is a Berlin-based artist, researcher and writer. Her interdisciplinary, practice-based projects focus on technologies, objects and concepts from the histories of human and medical sciences. She is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences Research Group at the MPIWG (until Aug. 2024). Her 2023 PhD thesis entitled On Intelligence Tests: Psychological Objects and Their Subjects makes an aesthetic enquiry into the material cultures and history of intelligence testing in the United States. Her current research extends this project to investigate the ways in which intelligence testing can be understood as “performing” science.

Bergstrom-Katz holds a PhD in Psychosocial Studies from Birkbeck, University of London and an MFA in Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently co-editing a special issue of the History of Human Sciences entitled The Material Force of Categories with Tomas Percival and is also co-editor of the forthcoming volume Art & Psychotherapy alongside Dr. Sarah Marks and Dr. Suzanne Hudson. In 2022, she was an Artistic Fellow at BS-Projects, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany. 

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I’m a PhD student in the DFG Research Training Group 2073 “Integrating Ethics and Epistemology of Science”. I earned my master’s degree in history, economics, and philosophy of science / interdisciplinary studies of science from Bielefeld University in 2021, and my bachelor’s degree in philosophy and history from Münster University. In my doctoral project, I focus on developing a sophisticated scientific pluralism fitted to the research practices in psychiatry. To do so, my case study, based on a qualitative analysis, examines treatment resistance research.

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Dr. Michele Luchetti is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bielefeld, working in the history and philosophy of science and medicine. He is also an independent theater practitioner and instructor. His academic research combines epistemological and historical insights to investigate issues related to measurement, conceptual change, and the relationship between science, values and society. He obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the Central European University in Budapest in 2020 and held research positions at the University of Geneva and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research has been published in several international research journals, and he is currently editing a topical collection on “Validity and Coordination in the Biomedical and Human Sciences” for the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. Beside his academic work, Michele is trained in the traditions of group theatre and theater anthropology, and uses theater laboratories as tools aimed at collective research and creation, and social integration. He was recently artist-in-residence at the Grotowski Institute (Poland, 2022) and at the Umbrian Theater Center (Italy, 2024), and he holds regular theater workshops in Italy and Switzerland, often in collaboration with social and medical institutions.

As part of the Research Group in the History and Philosophy of Medicine at the University of Bielefeld, Michele is developing a new project titled “Towards an Epistemology of Medical Performing”. The project purports to use an empirically-grounded philosophical approach to study how the performative dimension of medicine impacts medical knowledge. The investigation will pursue, among others, the following research questions:

• What is epistemically interesting about patient simulations in healthcare? How does the perfoming of medical students with patient simulators affects their epistemic views about medicine?
• How are medical practitioners affected by the public performances of expert patients (at medical conferences and training sessions)?
• To what extent are medical performances responsible for looping effects?

Michele is also co-organizing the international working group on “Performing Science and Medicine” (with Dr. Sasha Bergstrom-Katz, University of Bielefeld), hosting monthly meetings of researchers in HPS, STS and performing arts. In addition, he has a number of active international research collaborations, including those with Dr. Rebecca Jackson (University of Durham) on a series of articles on the history and philosophy of measurement, and with Dr. Matteo De Benedetto (IMT, Lucca) on co-constructive models of scientific change and values in science.

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Team assistent

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Team assistant
(Representation of Jovana Moldenhauer)

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I started my academic journey by studying Philosophy and Physics at the University of Leipzig. After completing both subjects with a Magister Artium, I took the opportunity to take a detour into African Studies and Computer Science without aiming for a degree. Six months later, I started my doctoral thesis on the deliberative justification of solidarity-based healthcare, also at the University of Leipzig. At the same time, I became researcher at the Institute for Ethics, History and Philosophy of Medicine at the University of Münster. There I worked on topics such as prioritization in medicine, scientific-theoretical and ethical issues in modern neuroscience and psychiatry, the difference between scientific medicine and alternative and complementary approaches and the question of what medical necessity can and should mean.

At Bielefeld University my current working field is the Philosophy of Medicine, in which I focus on both scientific theory and normative issues. In addition, I take a historical perspective on questions of philosophy of medicine in order to contextualize them and also to better understand some of the motivations behind the medical status quo.

The question of the scientific nature of medicine is a focus of my research and teaching. I am particularly interested in the scientific paradigm and goal of the best explanation of phenomena, because this is also of importance for patient-centered medicine: only when complex disease phenomena can be explained as precisely and predictably as possible treatment methods can be developed that are helpful for patients in a targeted manner. If, on the other hand, diseases are insufficiently described, their successful treatment is firstly difficult to prove and secondly, if it succeeds anyway, it is more a case of luck than consciously brought about support. In this respect, it seems plausible to me that scientific orientation, i.e. orientation towards scientific procedures and findings, is one of the prerequisites for patient-centered medicine.

I am currently mostly interested in the following questions:

• What is the status of evidence-based medicine within the sciences?
• What makes medicine science-orientated in the above sense? How does it differ from a purely scientific discipline?
• What are the normative frameworks of medicine that can be used to justify interventions in patients and study participants?
• How can scientific accuracy and thoroughness be realized under conditions of urgency?

You can find all information about Mrs Gennermann here:

https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/fb06/neueste-geschichte/personal-stuchtey/paulina-s-gennermann

You can find all information about Mrs Worliczek here.