#medical-humanities — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #medical-humanities, aggregated by home.social.
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Upcoming event at the Institute for #MedicalHumanities in Durham, UK:
#Measurement Heretics Workshop
Being, Meaning, and Measuring Well
https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/medical-humanities/events/measurement-heretics-workshop-being-meaning-and-measuring-well/
11.-13.03.2026Day 1 #hybrid keynote:
A fluid history of measurement: The drop in the metric revolution
Armel Cornu and Sarah Hijmans
[Day2-3 in-person] -
The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the School of English, University of St Andrews are offering a Joseph Bell Writer’s residency. The residency is open to writers or researchers in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, screenplay, literary and/or historical scholarship, life-writing and medical humanities.
Closing date: 12 noon, 6 March 2026
#Scottish #literature #writers #medicalhumanities #fiction #nonfiction #poetry #drama #screenplay #screenwriting
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"Writing the Brain" by Stefan Schöberlein looks at how C19 literature in Britain & the US incorporated discourses from the emerging neuroscience. Authors discussed incl #GeorgeCombe #CharlesDickens #EmilyDickinson #PlinyEarle #BenjaminRush & #AlfredTennyson
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CLS INFRA is reaching into the #MedicalHumanities 🩻🩹⚕️sector to suggest some Computational Literary tools & methods.
Check out our video: https://youtu.be/EXAdSsrMujkOur Survey of Methods and Toolkit for Data Sharing can help!
https://clsinfra.io/resources/beyond-academia/ -
[Publication] Hacking the Disease: Salvatore Iaconesi’s Sense-Making Quest for an Open-Source Cure for Cancer
The volume 3 n. 2 (2024) of the academic journal Re:visit – Humanities and Medicine in Dialogue has just been published. Based at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, the journal participates in the international debate within Medical Humanities, with articles in German and English. In this last volume, edited by Katharina Fürholzer, Julia Pröll and Maria Heidegger, you can find my article “Hacking the Disease: Salvatore Iaconesi’s Sense-Making Quest for an Open-Source Cure for Cancer“.
The article focuses on an analysis of the performance La Cura, by Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico, with the goal of highlighting the deep implications of their work in the effort of rethinking the relationship between culture, society, technology and biology, a task more necessary than ever in our digital societies.
Here is the abstract:
The experience of illness, as narrated by those who suffer from it, can provide significant insight for medical and health professionals, helping them to understand what their patient is going through, from a psychological and existential point of view. These narratives can also help to bridge the distance between science and experience, and to heal the gap that divides the sick person from the rest of society. The work that Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico have done with their performance La cura (The cure) – started when he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2012 – takes this kind of narrative and selfreflexive experience even further, in order to explore the relationship between culture, technology and biology, with the aim of redefining the meaning of cure (and, consequently, of illness and health) in a collective and inclusive way. La cura can thus be seen as a piece of work that, by belonging to the Medical Humanities, can also take a step forward in building a theoretical and practical dialogue between different disciplines in order to respond to the challenges of our digital (and biotechnological) society.
#Cancer #Cure #digitalHumanities #MedicalHumanities #OrianaPersico #ReVisit #SalvatoreIaconesi #UniversityOfInnsbruck
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Vielen Dank für Euer Votum! Die gewählte Reihenfolge für die nächsten Tage lautet wie folgt: Di: Medizin 🩻 Mi: Pilze 🍄 Do: Shakespeare 🎭 Fr: Drogen 💊 Im Verlauf des Tages folgt 1 Thread zum Thema Medizin bzw. zu den sog. #MedicalHumanities. 1/2
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:eu6urrd67yaoywvt6nzcl6ou/post/3ldgcierkg227 -
Memorialising the Death & Legacy of Robert Fergusson: Romantic Sympathy & Enlightenment Medical Improvement
Professor Rhona Brown looks at how Fergusson’s death had “not only a profound effect on a key figure in Edinburgh’s medical establishment but also a lasting influence on the therapeutic and psychiatric treatment available in the city”
3/5
#Scottish #literature #18thcentury #RobertFergusson #poet #poetry #enlightenment #medicalhumanities #psychiatry
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Registrations open for the #hybrid #roundtable: "Reflecting on 5 Years Post-COVID – Shaping the Future of Global Health", 13 Sept
w/experts on #publichealth, #virology, #ethics + #medicalhumanities 👇
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My second reason that this impetus to "humanize" is a problem is that the labor involved in "humanizing" (whatever the fuck that means) is very different than teaching humanities, and that the former undermines the latter's discursive, ideological, and social potential.
More simply, the answer to why the health humanities (or medical humanities) should exist is not "to make more ethical doctors"; instead, it is because humanists use of subjectivity undermines the harmful assumptions which undergird biomedical epistemics. (I use biomedical because 'health' is a bit too broad, and I have my own bone to pick.)
#medicalhumanities #healthhumanities -
I say this to lead to my second reason. There is a bigger question about what the *value* of the humanities? (This kind of question assumes a capitalistic value generation relationship, but I can't address that here.)
What the discourse about Humanity avoids is the discussion of method, and the messy, subjective work that starts to emerge when anyone has to do humanistic work. We shouldn't read novels with health topics to "humanize ourselves" but instead use those novels to teach us how to interpret representation, follow the ideological underpinnings of their argument, and understand our our subjectivity. (This could be any humanistic subject. I use novels as a short hand.)
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I say this for two reasons: first, I do not know if you can *humanize* medicine. (Using 'medicine' here because the 'health' in health humanities is useful designation that expands the field beyond medical humanities.) Would the doctors behind the Tuskegee syphilis study have stopped if they were given a history of medicine class? Would the doctors stealing organs from the bodies of children in the Alder Hey scandal not done this because they took a bioethics class? Medicine has larger ethical problems that are epistemic and ontological which the medical and health humanities cannot address if their job is to bandage the open wound that is the medical sciences.
Medicine cannot be humanized. (At least in the context of why the medical humanities should exist.)
#medicalhumanities #healthhumanities -
So leaning back on the "we teach doctors to be human" and that our work is about The Human seems a useful approach, but it is a position that leaves the discipline on a weak footing.
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I suspect this is a byproduct of academic resource distribution: it's a lot easier to look important if you oversee millions of dollars in research funding, the publication of dozens of articles every year, and your work provides value for a profession that is seen as an entry into the upper middle class. For humanistic research, which is usually less capitalizable, deals with smaller funding streams, and is often practiced by individuals (DH being an outlier), it is probably hard to convince the inclusion of any humanistic point of view at all, especially in the context of an all-consuming neoliberal research institution, which views all of its employees as value generating machines.
#medicalhumanities #healthhumanities -
The second problem sort of assumes that the humanities is a problem free discipline, but ignores all of the problems that cultural scholars, scholars of difference, and posthumanistic researchers have been arguing for decades: the humanities are also entwined in the violences of capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, ableism and so on. Just saying health humanists study Humanity writ large ignores the metadiscursive critiques other interdisciplinary scholars have been able to make about the broader field.
#medicalhumanities #healthhumanities -
The problem is twofold: first, the *value* of humanistic inquiry in this context is pedagogical not epistemic. We're here to teach some stuff, but our discourses don't overlap with the medical sciences. So there's an imbalance in the hierarchy of knowledge work. "Health humanists don't do *real* research . . ." and so on. So there's a lot of posturing in the articles I've read that seem to need to justify the discipline's right to exist.
Second, all of this builds into a weirdly essentializing argument: health humanists study Humanity and health. Like the capital 'H' humanity of humanism gets lobbed around more than I'm comfortable with.
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I'm running into this problem in the health humanities (medical humanities) literature, where the historical precedence for these perspectives in medical schools has mostly been to humanize the profession.
The argument (again historical) is that, "if we teach students the history of medicine, and have them reflect on art in medicine, they will be better doctors."
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A very interesting essay. #MedicalHumanities
Towards a translational medical humanities: introducing the cultural crossings of care | Medical Humanities
https://mh.bmj.com/content/46/2/e2 -
Recovering Imaginaries of Illness & Disability in Scottish Literature & Culture: Sources, Contexts, Theory
Études écossaises 23 | 2024 – open access
This special issue of Études écossaises looks at what recovering imaginaries of illness & disability in #Scottish #literature & #CulturalStudies might involve. Contributions deal with a number periods of Scottish culture, & a wide variety of sources & media.
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Academics create so many wonderful concepts and analytical tools. I'm currently exploring syndemic theory and am finding it incredibly fruitful. #anthropology #MedicalHumanities
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Discussion of my wonderful colleague April Patrick’s new book *Women’s Health in Britain and America: Texts and Contexts*! #MedicalHumanities
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Another new addition to our collection: this 2023 study by Leslie A. Schwalm on the intersection of race, science & medicine in the US Civil War & how anti-Black racism survived the destruction of slavery
https://opac.sub.uni-goettingen.de/DB=1/XMLPRS=N/PPN?PPN=1810893852
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As #syphilis is currently trending in online debates, here's an in-depth read on the depiction of the disease in #VictorianLiterature & #VictorianCulture!
Monika Pietrzak-Franger's study can be found here & ordered via interlibrary loan:
https://opac.sub.uni-goettingen.de/DB=1/XMLPRS=N/PPN?PPN=885277287 -
Posting my talk about visual culture and tuberculosis research circa 1900 at the New York Academy of Medicine last week. Was a pleasure to give it, and it was a useful opportunity to work through some of the more sticky parts of the diss I've been avoiding writing about. Check it out.
#visualculture #medicalhumanities #digitalhumanities #DH
https://tuberculosisspecimen.github.io/diss/2023/12/06/NYAMTalk.html
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Tomorrow our director Fredrik Ullén will hold the Philip Sandblom Prize #Lecture 2023 at @lunduniversity. The ceremony starting at 2pm will be streamed online (Swedish only): https://www.fysiografen.se/sv/aktuellt/sandblomdagen-2022/
#philipsandblomprize #medicalhumanities #empiricalaesthetics
