Medical Humanities Blog

Call for Papers: Southern Association for the History of Medicine & Science 13th Annual Meeting

2011 Conference - University of Tennessee Health Science Center Library, Memphis, TN, March 4-5, 2011

Call for Papers

The Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science (SAHMS) invites paper proposals for its thirteenth annual meeting on March 4-5, 2011, at the famous Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, sponsored by the University of Tennessee Health Science Center Library.

SAHMS welcomes papers on the history of medicine and science, broadly construed to encompass historical, literary, anthropological, philosophical and sociological approaches to health care and science including race, disabilities and gender studies. Participants may propose individual papers or panels of several papers on a particular theme.

Each presenter is limited to 20 minutes, with additional time for questions and discussion. Please do not submit papers that have already been published, presented or scheduled for presentation at another meeting. All participants are responsible for their own travel expenses and must pay registration costs in advance of the meeting. Student travel awards are available each year; for more information, contact SAHMS President Michael Flannery at flannery@uab.edu.

To submit proposals, please visit the online submission site at

http://library.uthsc.edu/sahms.

Required elements for the online proposals include Title, Purpose Statement, Rationale and Significance, Methodology, Sources, Findings & Conclusions, and Three Learning Objectives. For questions or problems with the submission site, contact Richard Nollan (rnollan@uthsc.edu) or Lisa Pruitt (lpruitt@mtsu.edu).

Deadline: September 30, 2010

______________________________________________________

I attended SAHMS 2010 and found it to be a collegial, informative, and rewarding conference.  Please do consider submitting!

(h/t H-Disability)

On Job, Stigmatization, and Chronic Pain

Daniel S. Goldberg (East Carolina University) (yes, that's me) has a new article out in Perspectives in Biology & Medicine entitled, Job and the Stigmatization of Chronic Pain.  Here is the Abstract:

Many ethical and policy analyses of the devastating undertreatment of chronic pain leave unaddressed the role played by stigma, even though the notion that such stigma exists is well documented. This article examines the social and cultural roots of the stigma of chronic pain in American society. I document the long history of illness stigma in Western societies as a way of illustrating the power of this meaning-making construct, and I use the Book of Job as a framework for understanding the deep link between sin and suffering in the context of illness and chronic pain in the United States. Unfortunately, while illness stigma can be ameliorated, there is little evidence of such progress in the undertreatment and stigmatization of chronic pain sufferers, and I explain some of the reasons why the best evidence does not demonstrate much improvement. I conclude by sketching some recommendations for diminishing the stigmatization of the chronic pain sufferer, and warn that the focus on altering the opioid regulatory regime is unlikely to have the desired impact in reducing the suffering of millions of Americans.

As readers of MH Blog likely know, the undertreatment of pain in the U.S. is the subject of my dissertation, and is a topic I have been working on for almost a decade now.  This particular essay engages a topic that I could only touch on briefly in my dissertation, namely, chronic pain and stigma.  Stigma, of course, is a crucial theme for the medical humanities.

Interested readers wishing a electronic copy are welcome to contact me privately.

On Borderlands and the Medical Humanities

Harold J. Cook, prior Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine (UCL), and author of the indescribably wonderful book Matters of Exchange, has a fascinating article in the current issue of Medical Humanities.  The article is entitled Borderlands: a historian's perspective on medical humanities in the US and the UK.  There is no abstract, but here is an excerpt:

Medical Humanities has developed as an important pedagogical ideal, although it is not a research field, at least not yet. Anyone with clinical, administrative, or personal responsibilities for other people is well aware of a duty of care requiring judgement. Judgement is an attribute applying as much to values as to knowledge, an ability to take appropriate decisions attuned to circumstances of person, context and moment. What one knows and has experienced provides a necessary foundation for deciding a course of action. And when patterns repeat themselves again and again, judgements can become routine. But because judgement is in the end about what best course of action to follow on particular occasions for particular people, general rules and universal truths can ever only be important helps, never giving determinative answers about how to act. Put another way, judgement is not about drawing conclusions but deciding what to do. The duty of care requires the practitioner to decide not what is true but what is best, and with the views of those under care taken into consideration, too . . . The complexities and ambiguities of the human condition, then, inform medicine profoundly, and exploring them often goes by the term ‘medical humanities’.

Given that the subject is aimed at forming good judgement rather than informing the content of any particular field of knowledge, the medical humanities can have no unified research programme . . .

Cook's work is immensely important to both the history of medicine and the medical humanities, and this is a fascinating, succint piece on the history of the medical humanities in the U.S. and the U.K., and the possibilities and pitfalls of the field of inquiry (and I hope I say this, gentle readers not simply because Cook spends a paragraph discussing IMH, where I trained!).  But I admit that there are some points I might want to respectfully dispute.  For example, I am not sure I understand why it is that because of its focus on the formation of good judgment -- a characterization with which I agree -- the medical humanities can have no unified research programme.  

I do believe that the medical humanities, like the studia humanitatis itself, demands more of its practitioners than the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake -- whether this is a worthy objective or not -- but I do not see why research from an interdisciplinary perspective on the formation of good judgment is not possible or even unlikely.  But perhaps I am simply misinterpreting . . .

In any case, the article is, like anything Cook writes, well-worth reading in its entirety, and then, immediately, worth reading again.

Call for Papers: Body and the Mind in the History of Medicine and Health (European Association for the History of Medicine & Health)

EAHMH Conference 2010, Utrecht, 1-4 September 2011
Body and the Mind in the History of Medicine and Health

Co-organised by the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities and by the University Medical Centre Utrecht

Deadline for proposals: 1 December 2010

Confirmed keynote speakers include: Floris Cohen, Jacalyn Duffin and Annemarie Mol

Call for Papers

The EAHMH invites submissions for its bi-annual meeting, to be in Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1-4 September 2011.  In the city whose name is closely linked to René Descartes, the Association welcomes abstracts on the general theme 'Body and Mind in the History of Medicine and Health'.  This theme encompasses research in any area where body and mind (and their interaction) were pivotal subjects in the creation of concepts, practices and institutions and in the lived experience of health and disease.  Papers addressing recent debates concerning historiography and/or methodology are especially welcomed.  Papers dealing with the teaching of medical history in a concrete way, as well as incorporating personal experiences, are also invited: it is hoped that a special session may be organised on the teaching of medical history.  Submissions relating to all historical periods and all regions are welcome, as are submissions from non-members.

Abstracts should not exceed one page and should include information concerning the scientific question examined, the sources and approach used and the (preliminary) results.  Abstracts should contain a title and the speaker's contact information (name, affiliation, address and email address).  In addition to single-paper proposals, proposals for sessions including three or four papers are also invited.  All papers in pre-arranged sessions will be judged according to their individual merits.  The Scientific Board of the EAHMH reserves the right to rearrange sessions in the light of proposals received.  Individual paper presentations will be limited to 20 minutes, allowing for 10 minutes of discussion.

Please submit all proposals for papers and sessions to EAHMHconference2011@umutrecht.nlThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it no later than 1 December 2010.

The full call for papers can be downloaded here.

The EAHMH is offering an award of EUR 500 for the best paper presented at the Utrecht conference by a PhD student.

_______________________________________________________________

As if this conference did not sound exciting enough, Utrecht in general and Utrecht University in particular are both incredible places (I speak having just visited both in the last month).  Can you imagine presenting on the history of medicine and health at the same university in which Descartes worked and spoke, frequently, of course, on medical and physiological topics? In addition, the University also features what in my view is one of the finer centers of applied ethics in the Western world.  The mind boggles.  (Yes, I plan to submit a paper!)

On Global Justice and the Social Determinants of Health

Sridhar Venkatapuram has authored an article in the summer 2010 of Ethics & International Affairs (vol. 24, no. 2) entitled Global Justice and the Social Determinants of Health.  The ethical implications of research on the SDOH is at the core of my research agenda and remains, IMO, undertheorized (or so I shall argue in forthcoming presentations and papers).  In any case, the article is available full-text and is highly recommended.   

(h/t Equidad listserv)

Conference Program: The Future of Medical History (UCL)

To mark the closing of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, the Centre is hosting a conference entitled "The Future of Medical History" on 15-17 July at Goodenough College.  I will be in Europe at the time, but will be attended another conference in Germany and will, sadly, be unable to attend.

But the preliminary program and list of speakers is now available on the conference website, and it looks well-worth attending.

(h/t Corporeality Blog)