Dr. Ketil Slagstad

researcher staff

Charité - University Medicine Berlin
Thielallee 71
14195 Berlin

Expertise

Ketil Slagstad is a research fellow at the Institute for History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at Charité since 2022. His research focuses on the emergence and negotiation of medical knowledge between experts, patients, and activists in the history of transgender medicine and the AIDS epidemic. He is particularly interested in the role of the welfare state in regulating medical practices, but also in how the welfare state context has enabled certain social medical styles of thought and practice.

In October 2022, Ketil Slagstad received his Ph.D. with a thesis on the history of transgender medicine in Scandinavia in the 20th century.
He is currently working on a publication about the history of the AIDS epidemic in Norway. The project is particularly concerned with the time structures and time views of an epidemic.

Current research project

The research project Werkzeuge des klinischen Wissens (Tools of Clinical Knowledge) is a science-historical-praxeological analysis of clinical research in the late 20th century with a long-term psychiatric study of schizophrenia as an empirical example. The main goal of the project is to offer a different perspective on the popular notion in the state of research of clinical knowledge flow "from bench to bedside", from laboratory to clinic: Clinical research is also possible the other way around: from the clinic to the laboratory.

Research focus

History of clinical research
History of transgender medicine
History of the AIDS epidemic
History of social medicine
History of psychiatry

Selected publications

Ketil Slagstad, Visualizing BDSM and AIDS Activism: Archiving Pleasures, Sanitizing History, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2023; jrad012, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrad012

Slagstad, K. (2022) ‘Bureaucratizing Medicine: Creating a Gender Identity Clinic in the Welfare State’, Isis, 113, 3, 469-490, doi:10.1086/721140

Slagstad, K. and Lie, A.K. (2022) ‘Selling Sex in the Age of AIDS: Activism, Politics, and Medicine in Norway, 1983–1990’. In: Weston, J. and Kershaw, H. (Hg.), Histories of HIV/AIDS in Europe, 1980–2019. Manchester University Press

Slagstad, K. ‘Visualizing BDSM and AIDS Activism: Archiving Pleasures, Sanitizing History. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences [accepted]

Slagstad, K. ‘Psychiatric Practices Beyond Psychiatry: The Sexological Administration of Transgender Life around 1980’. In: Voelker, H. and Gahlen, G. (Hg.), Doing Psychiatry. Practices in European Psychiatric Institutions and Beyond, 1945–1990. Manchester University Press [accepted]

Slagstad, K. (2021) ‘Society as Cause and Cure: The Norms of Transgender Social Medicine’, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry,45, 3:456-478, doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09727-4

Slagstad, K. (2021) ‘The Political Nature of Sex: Transgender in the History of Medicine’, New England Journal of Medicine, 384:1070-1074, doi.org/10.1056/NEJMms2029814

Slagstad, K. (2020) ‘The Amphibious Nature of AIDS Activism: Medical Professionals and Gay and Lesbian Communities in Norway, 1975–87’, Medical History, 64, 3, 401-435, doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2020.21

Slagstad, K. (2020) ‘The Pasts, Presents and Futures of AIDS, Norway (1983–1996)’, Social History of Medicine, 34, 2: 417-444, doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkaa018

Vita Dr. Ketil Slagstad

Ketil Slagstad studied human medicine at the University of Oslo, worked for several years as a physician in anesthesiology and internal medicine, and as a medical editor at the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association. He received his German license to practice medicine in 2016, and in 2019 he began his dissertation on the history of transgender medicine in Scandinavia at the University of Oslo, graduating with a Ph.D. in October 2022. In 2021/22, Ketil Slagstad was a Fulbright student at the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Since 2020, he has worked as a freelance critic for the weekly newspaper Morgenbladet, where he reviews books on the history of science and medicine.