Alexandre Wenger

Full Professor, Director Cibshm

+41.22.379.46.02
+41.22.379.46.19
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Group Leader of the Medical Humanities research group

I am Professor of Medical Humanities in the Faculty of Medicine, and Director of the Interfaculty Centre for Bioethics and Medical Humanities.

My research explores the historical links between medicine and the arts (including poetry, novels and film). I am currently co-PI of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)/French National Research Agency (ANR) project ‘ArchiMed: Mining Medical Archives in the Digital Age’ (2024-2028), which takes an interdisciplinary approach to biobanks and historic medical collections of human tissue specimens. I have a particular interest in the history of syphilis, and was a PI and project leader on the SNSF Sinergia international research project ‘An Interdisciplinary Project: Searching for an Integrated Model to Explain Neverending Infectious Diseases – The Case of Syphilis, 1859 to the Present’ (2020-2024). I have also created an online platform dedicated to d ermatological wax moulages, which takes its cue from the material history of medicine.

I am a member of the Université Grenoble Alpes International Advisory Board and a former member of the Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève Clinical Ethics Council, and am also regularly involved in organising international academic events, such as the WKD (World Knowledge Dialogue) 2021 and the 2023 Brocher Foundation Summer School ‘Tracing Never-ending Diseases’.

I run the CineMed platform, which brings together teaching, research and public engagement initiatives exploring the links between film and medicine, and am regularly involved in events designed to open up academic research to the general public, for example as a committee member for the Salon Planète Santé Live, which runs Planète Ciné events, and as a member of the Geneva Festival Histoire et Cité editorial board.

My academic background is in literature and the history of medicine, and I have undertaken a number of research residencies abroad, including at ENS Paris and the Institut für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert-Bosch Stiftung in Stuttgart. In 2005 I was awarded a Doctor of Arts degree from the Université de Genève, based on a thesis examining the disease-causing effects attributed to reading by eighteenth-century physicians.

From 2011 to 2017 I was a professor at the University of Fribourg, where I developed and ran the interdisciplinary programme on ‘Medicine and Society’. I established Switzerland’s first writing prize for medical students, and led the SNSF project ‘La Figure du poète médecin (20^e-21^e s.)’, which explored the poet-physicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Latest publication: Les moulages médico-pathologiques en cire. Objets d'art, de savoirs et d'enseignements (fin XIX^e-XXI^e siècle), themed issue edited by Alexandre Wenger, Histoire, médecine et société 27 (2025), available online.

Forthcoming: with Guillaume Linte, Histoire des maladies vénériennes en Suisse romande (1880-1945), a book on venereal disease in French-speaking Switzerland over the period 1880-1945, due to be published by Antipodes.

RESEARCH

literature and medicine, from the eighteenth century to the present day
interdisciplinary approaches to historic medical collections
forms and functions of medical writing (treatises, case studies, scientific poetry, etc.)
doctors in fiction (literature, film and TV)
the history of syphilis
narrative ethics in contemporary medicine

Group Leader of the Medical Humanities research group

TEACHING

I am a member of the elective module steering committee at the Faculty of Medicine, where I am responsible for coordinating teaching in Medical Humanities. I also run the clinical-based learning module on ‘The Doctor and the Dying’ on the Internal Medicine course, and am a member of the faculty working group on the use of generative AI in teaching. I am the course director of the ‘Literature, Cinema and Medicine’ master’s in medicine, and was part of the federal working group that developed PROFILES (Principal Relevant Objectives and Framework for Integrative Learning and Education in Switzerland) for Swiss medical students.

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

Staff