Biography

Tom Behrendt is a PhD candidate in the Medical Humanities. His academic interests focus on the (cultural) history of medicine, hospitals, and the body.

After completing a degree in philosophy with a focus on philosophy of science, Tom earned his master's degree at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Amsterdam. In his master's thesis, he examined the biopolitical governance of health through the lense of obesity in East Germany during the 1970s.

In addition to various student assistant positions at Humboldt University (2019–2022), his academic career includes a position as research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2022–2024). Tom is also involved in volunteer work at Unionhilfswerk, where he supports the development of the company archive.

His current doctoral project reconstructs the genesis of the "hospital discharge letter" between 1900 and 1970. Through the analysis of patient records from Swiss hospital archives, Tom traces how this central medical document evolved from an epistolary form into a highly stylized documentation system. This perspective opens up insights into the epistemic function of medical documentation practices while simultaneously pointing to the constitutive role of the discharge letter during the transformation of the hospital into a techno-scientific institution.