Medical Humanities Blog

Call for Papers: Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness

Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness

9-11 June 2010
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Chicago, Illinois

This second international interdisciplinary conference* aims to explore the past, present, and possible future of comics in the context of the healthcare experience.  Programs in medical humanities have long touted the benefits of reading literature and studying visual art in the medical setting, but the use of comics in healthcare practice and education is relatively new.  The melding of text and image has much to offer all members of the healthcare team, including patients and families.  As such, a subgenre of graphic narrative known as graphic medicine is emerging as a field of
interest to both scholars and creators of comics.

We are pleased to confirm two important keynote speakers: David Small, author of 'Stitches' and Phoebe Gloeckner, author of 'A Child's Life.'

We invite proposals for scholarly papers (15 minutes), poster presentations, and panel discussions (60 minutes), focused on medicine and comics in any form (e.g., graphic novels, comic strips, graphic pathographies, manga, and/or web comics) on the following—and related—topics:

• graphic pathographies of illness and disability
• the use of comics in medical education the use of comics in patient care
• the interface of graphic medicine and other visual arts in popular
  culture
• ethical implications for using comics to educate the public
• ethical implications of patient representation in comics by healthcare providers
• trends in international use of comics in healthcare settings
• the role of comics in provider/patient communication
• comics as a virtual support group for patients and caregivers
• the use of comics in bioethics discussions and education

We also welcome workshops (120 minutes) by creators of comics on the process, rationale, methods, and general theories behind the use of comics to explore medical themes. These are intended to be “hands-on” interactive workshops for participants who wish to obtain particular skills with regard to the creation or teaching about comics in the medical context.

We envision this gathering as a collaboration among humanities scholars, comics scholars, comics creators, healthcare professionals, and comics enthusiasts.

300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday, 28 February 2011 to submissions@graphicmedicine.org. Proposals may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract.  Please identify your presentation preference: 1)oral presentation; 2) poster presentation; 3) panel discussion; or 4)
workshop. While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice, we will attempt to honor people’s preferences, and We will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals submitted.

Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by 14 March 2011.

This event is co-sponsored by the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine, and the Science, Technology and Society Program of Penn State University, and is supported by a grant from the Charles Schulz Foundation.

*Information about the 2010 conference, “Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels,” in London, England can be found at www.graphicmedicine.org.

Call for Applications: New York Academy of Medicine History of Medicine Fellowships

Applications are currently being accepted for the New York Academy of Medicine's two history of medicine fellowships for 2011-2012 : the Paul Klemperer Fellowship in the History of Medicine and the Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Public Health.  For those who were familiar with the Helfand Fellowship in the past, please note that its focus has changed and read the description and application materials carefully.

Information about both fellowships can be found on the Now Accepting Applications page here: http://www.nyam.org/grants/

Questions about the fellowships and the application process may be directed to me (contact information below).  Contact information also appears with the applications themselves.

Arlene Shaner
Assistant Curator and Reference Librarian for Historical Collections The New York Academy of Medicine
1216 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10029
Tel: 212-822-7313
Fax: 212-423-0273
Email: ashaner@nyam.org

__________________________________

(h/t H-SCI-MED-TECH)

On AIDS, Academia, and the Politics of Global Health

Johanna T. Crane (University of Washington-Bothell & Office of History at NIH) has an excellent new article out in Behemoth (what a great name for "a journal on civilization") entitled Unequal Partners: AIDS, Academia, and the Rise of Global Health.  Here is the Abstract:

The last decade has seen the proliferation of “global health” departments, centers, programs, and majors across top research universities in North America and Europe. This trend has been particularly pronounced in the United States, where it is connected to America's new role as a major sponsor of HIV treatment in Africa. This paper describes the rise of “global health” as a research, funding, and training priority within U.S. academic medicine, and the increasing desirability of “global health partnerships” with institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. Leading spokespersons emphasize that “partnership” with poor nations is central to the mission of global health, an ethic that distinguishes it from older, more paternalistic traditions of international health and tropical medicine. However, at the same time, the field of academic global health depends on steep inequalities for its very existence, as it is the opportunity to work in impoverished, low-tech settings with high disease burdens that draws North American researchers and clinicians to global health programs and ensures their continued funding. This paradox – in which inequality is both a form of suffering to be redressed and a professional, knowledge-generating, opportunity to be exploited – makes the partnerships to which global health aspires particularly challenging. 



The article is recommended.

(h/t Somatosphere)

Call for Papers: Disability and Native American/Indigenous Studies

Call for Papers: Disability and Native American/Indigenous Studies

Special Issue of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability (JLCDS)

Guest Editors, Siobhan Senier and Penelope Kelsey

In Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia 1900-1950, a Nisga’a elder implores the historian Mary Ellen Kelm: “When we talk about the poor health of our people, remember it all began with the white man” (xv). 

This special issue of JLCDS invites scholars to consider two interrelated phenomena: on the one hand, colonialism has produced indigenous disability and illness-through the depletion of traditional sources of food and medicine, enforced containment in boarding schools and substandard reservation housing, trauma, poverty and so on.  On the other hand, colonial discourse also pathologizes Native people-construing them as genetically prone to certain illnesses, for instance.   Given these colonial phenomena, scholarship is particularly welcome that considers how Native people indigenize the famous disability-rights call, “nothing about us without us”-bringing tribally situated responses, adaptations, and resistance to disability and illness.

JLCDS seeks essays that conjoin the methodologies and content of Disability Studies with Native American/Indigenous Studies.  The texts under consideration can range from literature and film, in any genre, to non-print and non-alphabetic media.  Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

• Tribally specific understandings/representations of illness and disability;Applications of Disability Studies to indigenous texts;
• Applications of indigenous methodologies to disability literature;
• Colonization, medicalization, and the construction of disability;
• Indigenous nationalisms, feminisms, and Two-Spirited resistance to the
  non-Native construction of disability;
• Illnesses/disabilities more emic to the American Indian experience (i.e., tuberculosis, diabetes, PTSD, Split Feather syndrome);
• Environmental degradation and racism and community health;
• Representations of substance abuse and other community health concerns in colonial contexts;
• Representations of indigenous disability vis-à-vis nation or community.

Proposals and queries should be sent to Siobhan.Senier@unh.edu and
Penelope.Kelsey@colorado.edu

Proposals are due by March 15, 2011, and proposal selections will be made by May 30, 2011.  Completed essays for those selected are due October 1, 2011, and articles will be selected in December of 2011.

Dr. David Bolt
Lecturer, Disability Studies
http://www.hope.ac.uk/boltd 
Director, Centre for Culture & Disability Studies ccds.hope.ac.uk
Editor, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies
http://liverpool.metapress.com/content/121628 
Email: boltd@hope.ac.uk 
Telephone 0151 291 3346
Postal address@ Faculty of Education, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool,
L16 9JD

____________________________________________________

I have had the privilege of having some contact with Native American communities in connection with health and illness, and I have virtually always come away deeply affected.  I submit that most anyone who works on the social determinants of health, law/policy and chronic illness, inequities, stigma, etc., could not help but feel something similar.  For a particularly well-done snapshot of some of these matters, I recommend episode 4 of Unnatural Causes, entitled Bad Sugar.   

This sounds like an important CFP, and I very much look forward to reading the theme issue when it comes out.

(h/t H-DISABILITY listserv)

On Milk Banks & Islamic Bioethics

Mohammed Ghaly (Univ. of Leiden) has a fascinating new article out in Bioethics entitled Milk Banks Through the Lens of Muslim Scholars: One Text in Two Contexts.  Here is the Abstract:

When Muslims thought of establishing milk banks, religious reservations were raised. These reservations were based on the concept that women's milk creates ‘milk kinship’ believed to impede marriage in Islamic Law. This type of kinship is, however, a distinctive phenomenon of Arab tradition and relatively unknown in Western cultures. This article is a pioneer study which fathoms out the contemporary discussions of Muslim scholars on this issue. The main focus here is a religious guideline (fatwa) issued in 1983, referred to in this article as ‘one text’, by the Egyptian scholar Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī who saw no religious problem in establishing or using these banks. After a number of introductory remarks on the ‘Western’ phenomenon of milk banks and the ‘Islamic’ phenomenon of ‘milk kinship’, this article analyses the fatwa of al-Qaradāwī‘one text’ and investigates the ‘two contexts’ in which this fatwa was discussed, namely, the context of the Muslim world and that of Muslim minorities living in the West. The first context led to rejecting the fatwa and refusing to introduce the milk banking system in the Muslim world. The second context led to accepting this system and thus allowing Muslims living in the West to donate and receive milk from these banks. Besides its relevance to specialists in the fields of Islamic studies, anthropology and medical ethics, this article will also be helpful to physicians and nurses who deal with patients of Islamic background.

I had the great good fortune of meeting (and arguing with) Mohammed Ghaly at a conference held at the ZiF while I was in residence there over the past summer.  Ghaly is a gentleman and a scholar, and his work is particularly erudite and insightful.

If you like Ghaly's article, do take a look at his recently published book on Islam & Disability, which is, IMO, one-of-a-kind as an English-language work.

Table of Contents: Social History of Medicine 23, no. 3 (2010)

Although the entire TOC for the journal Social History of Medicine should be consumed post-haste by anyone with a remote interest in the subject, I'd like to pick out two papers that appear in the current issue.

The first is authored by Hannah Newton (University of Exeter), and is entitled Children's Physic: Medical Perceptions and Treatment of Sick Children in Early Modern England, c. 1580–1720 (subscription required).  Here is the Abstract:

Historians of medicine, childhood and paediatrics have often assumed that early modern doctors neither treated children, nor adapted their medicines to suit the peculiar temperaments of the young. Through an examination of medical textbooks and doctors' casebooks, this article refutes these assumptions. It argues that medical authors and practising doctors regularly treated children, and were careful to tailor their remedies to complement the distinctive constitutions of children. Thus, this article proposes that a concept of ‘children's physic’ existed in early modern England. This term refers to the notion that children were physiologically distinct, requiring special medical care. Children's physic was rooted in the ancient traditions of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine: it was the child's humoral make-up that underpinned all medical ideas about children's bodies, minds, diseases and treatments. Children abounded in the humour blood, which made them humid and weak, and in need of medicines of a particularly gentle nature.

I have had the privilege of exchanging some correspondence with Dr. Newton, in part because of my interest in treatments of pain and suffering in the early modern period.  Patient narratives are relatively difficult to come by in the nineteenth century, let alone the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, and finding material that provides some material for constructing some of the meanings of pain and suffering for illness sufferers during those periods are even more rare, I suspect.  Hence Dr. Newton's analysis of these subjects is both significant in its own right and especially valuable to my own work on the history of pain.

Although my work on that subject centers on mid-to-late 19th c. America, periodicity is ever a danger and hence I have found it important and helpful to contextualize my work in reference to older attitudes, practices, beliefs, and traditions regarding the experience of pain.  

The article is highly recommended.

The second article I wanted to highlight is Roger Cooter's (UCL, Wellcome Centre) essay review of the anthology entitled The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics, edited by Robert B. Baker (Union College) and Laurence B. McCullough (Baylor College of Medicine).  The review is entitled Inside the Whale: Bioethics and Discourse.  There is no Abstract, but here is an excerpt:

Like medical ethics before it, bioethics has a history of opportunism. Long before revelations in the 1990s that some of its institutions in the USA were funded by the pharmaceutical industry, the enterprise was hailed for saving clapped-out philosophy departments and their professors. It got bums on seats, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin stated in 1981.  Less cynical, if more sinister, was the observation by Alasdair MacIntyre in 1984, that this was a domain where the ideological function of dominant conceptions masked professional power and authority, shielding it from general moral scrutiny.  Many other scholars soon came to an equally jaundiced view, so much so that by the 1990s charges of ‘ethnocentrism, medicocentricism, [and] psychocentricism’ had become cliché among those seeking to reinvigorate what had become a bureaucratized managerial set of practices driven by an empiricist methodology and mindset (notes omitted).

The review is highly recommended.  

On Schizophrenia

Rachel Aviv, an award-winning mental health journalist, has a fascinating piece following a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia in the latest issue of Harper's (subscription required).

Here are the opening sentences:

Anna did not simply decide one day that people are made of paper.  She came to the conclusion slowly and reluctantly, several months after she first noticed that the consistency of everything around her had subtly changed.

Although I do not agree with all of the points Aviv makes, her writing is compelling and the article is well-worth reading and reflecting upon.

On Neighborhood Socioeconomic Deprivation & Mortality

There's an excellent new paper published in PLoS One authored by Jacqueline M. Major et al. entitled Neighborhood Socioeconomic Deprivation and Mortality: NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study.

Here is the Abstract:

Purpose

Residing in deprived areas may increase risk of mortality beyond that explained by a person's own SES-related factors and lifestyle. The aim of this study was to examine the relation between neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation and all-cause, cancer- and cardiovascular disease (CVD)-specific mortality for men and women after accounting for education and other important person-level risk factors.

Methods

In the longitudinal NIH-AARP Study, we analyzed data from healthy participants, ages 50–71 years at study baseline (1995–1996). Deaths (n = 33831) were identified through December 2005. Information on census tracts was obtained from the 2000 US Census. Cox models estimated hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for quintiles of neighborhood deprivation.

Results

Participants in the highest quintile of deprivation had elevated risks for overall mortality (HRmen = 1.17, 95% CI: 1.10, 1.24; HRwomen = 1.13, 95% CI: 1.05, 1.22) and marginally increased risk for cancer deaths (HRmen = 1.09, 95% CI: 1.00, 1.20; HRwomen = 1.09, 95% CI: 0.99, 1.22). CVD mortality associations appeared stronger in men (HR = 1.33, 95% CI: 1.19, 1.49) than women (HR = 1.18, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.38). There was no evidence of an effect modification by education.

Conclusion

Higher neighborhood deprivation was associated with modest increases in all-cause, cancer- and CVD-mortality after accounting for many established risk factors.

This is a particularly interesting study because of its efforts to control for "person-specific risk factors" in the hopes of evaluating the extent to which simply living in a deprived neighborhood can produce deleterious effects on health.  The fact that the investigators found statistically significant increases between such deprivation and all-cause, cancer, and CVD mortality is both unsurprising and significant given the increasing evidence in the SDOH literature that "place matters."  Here the authors posit some mechanisms for the relationship:

"Potential mechanisms by which neighborhood deprivation may influence mortality include physical environment/environmental exposures and social norms. In particular, areas with higher deprivation may have issues such as limited availability of or access to healthy foods and health care, higher environmental pollution, and lack of social networks that might also impact mortality risk independently of the characteristics of the people living in those areas."

The article is recommended.

(h/t SDOH listserv)