
Barna Szamosi participated in the 25th EAHMH Conference: Health Beyond Medicine in Berlin that took place from 26-29 August 2025.
He co-presented his and Victoria Shmidt's joint work on 29th August, which comparatively discussed guidelines for genetic counseling in Central and Eastern European socialist countries.
In the past years, conceptions of health have been challenged on multiple levels. Medical interventions appear as one among a variety of factors that contribute to priority setting in health and wellbeing, from vaccination to laboratory capacities, and from the small scale of individual experiences to global policies. Within history of medicine, we see an increasing interest in histories on health policies and practices cutting across international, national and local registers, connecting various, hitherto marginalized actors, processes and experiences. Such studies expand our understanding of approaches to health, and raise the awareness for global and local dynamics that contribute to their change.
In this context, various analytical pathways in history, philosophy, and social studies of medicine can establish productive approaches to the emergence, circulation and transformation of priorities in health and wellbeing through time and space. The EAHMH 2025 conference Health Beyond Medicine thus aims to bring into conversation methods in and beyond history and fields in and beyond medicine that are often siloed in academic contexts, in healing practices, and in policy making, focusing on topics such as public health, biomedical sciences and patient and health activism.