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Medical Humanities Blog

Posted: 29 Oct 2010 06:06 AM PDT

The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics has a theme issue (vol. 3, no. 2) out on "Disability Studies in Feminist Bioethics." The TOC is available here, and the issue is chock-a-block with fascinating, insightful reading. In particular, take a look at Margaret P.

Wardlaw's* article entitled The Right-to-Die Exception: How the Discourse of Individual Rights Impoverishes Bioethical Discussions of Disability and What We Can do About it.

Here is the Abstract:

Major considerations of disability studies—such as provision of care, accommodation for disabled people, and issues surrounding institutionalization—have been consistently marginalized in American bioethical discourse. The right to die, however, stands out as a paradigmatic bioethical debate. Why do advocates for expanding the volition and self-direction of disabled people emerge from the periphery only to help those disabled people who choose death? And why do the majority of people assume an unrealistically low quality of life for those with disabilities? This paper will argue that the dominance of the Western liberal tradition in American culture motivates both these phenomena: by emphasizing individual rights over duties and responsibilities, assuming the isolated and independent rights-bearer as the prototypical person, and evoking an unrealistically atomistic view of human interaction. As an alternative, I offer a framework rooted in feminist ethics that emphasizes context, gives moral weight to human relationships, abandons the problematic ideal of a lone rights-bearer, and emphasizes the mutual vulnerability of embodied individuals.

I am so pleased to see such challenges to dominant individualist conventions in American bioethics, and both feminist and disability lenses provide particularly helpful vantage points for unpacking the weaknesses of what Charles Taylor refers to as "methodological individualism." If Wardlaw's topic interests readers, also check out Paul Longmore's powerful article, cited here, entitled Policy, Prejudice, and Reality: Two Case Studies of Physician-Assisted Suicide. I've taught this article on several occasions, and the students have almost uniformly reported it to be -- forgive the cliche -- paradigm-shifting.

Check out Wardlaw's article, and the entire issue.

(*Disclosure: Margaret Wardlaw is a friend and a colleague, as well as a graduate student with me during my training at IMH).

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Medical Humanities

Hippocrates Prize and 2nd International Symposium in Poetry and Medicine

Posted: 26 Oct 2010 10:07 AM PDT

The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, is now accepting applications for the 2011 entry and invites both national and international submissions. I attended the one-day symposium and prizegiving last year and it was a real treat. The talks were very varied and it was a delight to hear the prizewinners read their poems. Next year's symposium is scheduled for 7 May 2011.

More details here.

New blog, and help save the workhouse!

Posted: 26 Oct 2010 09:52 AM PDT

The Centre for Humanities and Health at King's College London has a new blog which has a number of posts on Medical Humanities related topics, contributed by staff and students at the Centre. Of particular note is the campaign by historian Ruth Richardson to save the Strand Union Workhouse. There is more information about the workhouse, and a chance to sign a petition to save it from redevelopment as office space, at the website http://www.workhouses.org/. Do get involved -- this is an important part of London's medical and architectural history. There is also a Facebook campaign underway here.

Law & Humanities Blog

Slavery As Immigration

Posted: 26 Oct 2010 08:54 AM PDT

Rhonda V. Magee, University of San Francisco Law School, has published Slavery as Immigration? in volume 44 of the University of San Francisco Law Review (2009). Here is the abstract.

Slavery as Immigration? In this essay, the author argues that transatlantic slavery was, in significant part, an immigration system of a particularly pernicious sort – a system of forced migration immigration aimed at fulfilling the nascent country's needs for a controllable labor population, and desire for a racialized one.

As such, the law and policy of chattel slavery should be viewed as perhaps the most important historical antecedent to contemporary immigration law regarding low- and unskilled labor in the United States. Following an analysis of the treatment of chattel slavery in general immigration history scholarship, and in scholarship on the history of immigration law, the author concludes that immigration law texts must include a discussion of chattel slavery that properly locates that system as a forerunner of modern immigration law and policy, and immigration scholars should devote more attention to chattel slavery. She concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of such a reframing for the American national community as a whole. Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Audio Files Available For Morawetz Book On Law and Literature

Posted: 26 Oct 2010 08:52 AM PDT

Now available from Wolters/Kluwer: Audio Files to accompany Thomas Morawetz's book Literature and the Law (originally published 2007). More here.

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Digital Excursion: Growing Knowledge at the British Library

Posted: 26 Oct 2010 02:24 AM PDT

Last night saw UCLDH's first digital excursion of the new term. We had an afterhours look at the "Growing Knowledge: The evolution of research" exhibition at the British Library. The exhibition aims to demonstrate the vision for future digital research services at the British Library. Digital research tools are changing the possibilities of research, extending the [...]

Law & Humanities Blog

Some New Books of Interest

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 08:41 AM PDT

Some new books of interest

The Creation of the "IUS Commune": From "Casus" to "Regula" edited by John W. Cairns and Paul J. du Plessis (John W. Cairns and Paul J. du Plessis, eds. Edinburgh University Press, dist. Columbia University Press, 2010).

Jackson, Cassandra, Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body (Routledge, 2010).

Kidd, Thomas S., God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (Basic Books, 2010).

Kohl, Christiane, The Witness House: Nazis and Holocaust Survivors Sharing a Villa During the Nuremberg Trials (Other Press, 2010). Translated by Anthea Bell.

Lerner, Josh, and Mark Schankerman, The Comingled Code: Open Source and Economic Development (MIT Press, 2010).

Livingston, James D., Arsenic and Clam Chowder: Murder in Gilded Age New York (State University of New York Press, 2010).

Mackedon, Michon, Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert (Black Rock Institute Press, distributed by Museum of New Mexico Press, 2010).

Savage, Robert J., A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society, 1960-72 (Manchester University Press, dist., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Titone, Nora, My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy (Free Press, 2010).

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships
PhD studentship at UCL Information Studies
Designing the e-book

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships

Posted: 21 Oct 2010 08:00 AM PDT

I’ve been thinking about the plight of PhD students, after Claire Ross’ excellent blog entry. I thought it might be useful to consider what might happen at the other end of the PhD.

At UCLDH we are part of the UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanities who have agreed to contribute to the costs of [...]

PhD studentship at UCL Information Studies

Posted: 21 Oct 2010 07:16 AM PDT

Regular readers will know how much we love PhD students here at UCLDH. We can’t get enough of them, almost literally. This time the studentship on offer is for the whole of the department in which UCLDH sits, that’s the iSchool for the benefit of our North American readers. So obviously this is going to [...]

Designing the e-book

Posted: 19 Oct 2010 05:44 AM PDT

Please join us on Thursday 21 October for the London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship, at which Dr Stan Ruecker will be presenting his work on designing effective digital environments for reading. ‘In, Around, and Beyond the Electronic Book: INKE designs and prototypes to make working with digital text more enjoyable and rewarding’ Stan [...]

Medical Humanities Blog

On ASBH

Posted: 21 Oct 2010 09:00 AM PDT

I am off to the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities 12th Annual Meeting. I do have the honor of presenting several items during the Conference, so if there are any Gentle Readers who are of a mind to go and hear me rant and rave in person rather than over the blogosphere, such persons will have such a(n) penalty opportunity.

Readers are always welcome to say hello in any case; comments and suggestions for MH Blog are equally welcome and desired.

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Law & Humanities Blog

Theory of Sovereignty In the Hebrew Bible

Posted: 20 Oct 2010 08:14 AM PDT

Geoffrey P. Miller, New York University School of Law, has published Sovereignty and Conquest in the Hebrew Bible, as NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 10-61. Here is the abstract.

This article examines the Hebrew Bible's theory of sovereignty with special reference to the book of Joshua. The author conceives of sovereignty as the exclusive and absolute control over territory. The sovereign is "all Israel" – the biblical analogue to "we the people." The territory is the land promised to the Patriarchs and partially conquered by Joshua in the war of conquest. Israel's title to this territory is established vis-à-vis foreign nations by boundary agreement (Aram), partition (Ammon and Moab), abandonment (Edom), and renunciation (Egypt); its right to dispossess the prior inhabitants is based on theories of conquest, capacity, appropriation, grant, promise, purchase and contract. Israel's control over territory is explored in narratives describing the allocation of the Promised Land. The author's approach is pragmatic rather than programmatic, stressing the value of fair procedures and recognizing arguments for distributive justice based on merit, equality, productivity, expectations and need. The author argues that a property distribution, even if fair ex ante, must also be accepted as reasonable ex post.

Download the full text from SSRN at the link.

Documentary Films, Law and Justice

Posted: 20 Oct 2010 08:09 AM PDT

Cynthia D. Bond, The John Marshall Law School, has published Documenting Law: Reality & Representation on Trial. Here is the abstract.

Documentary films frequently address issues of social and political injustice; thus, however indirectly, implicating law as their subject. Documentary film and legal process also frequently share formal similarities as they both seek to reconstruct actual events through representational techniques. Thus, notions of the truth are deeply overdetermined in documentary films about law. To most lay spectators, such documentaries are truth-seeking systems (documentary film) depicting a truth-seeking system (law). Thus, it is particularly useful to analyze the impressions of law lay spectators gain (or confirm) from these films since, given the truth claims of documentaries, spectators may more fully trust images of law in them than in fiction film. Documentaries engage different strategies in ignoring, negotiating, or acknowledging the overdetermined sources of truth they contain. First, many documentaries mount a competing narrative of truth, contesting the ability of legal processes to adequately find the truth (a dynamic this article dubs "Film vs. Law"). Alternatively, documentaries may contest law's truth claims without fully supplanting them with their own purportedly superior access to truth ("Film and Law"). These films both critique the truth claims of the legal process while acknowledging the inevitably open-ended and provisional nature of the events they reference. Finally, documentaries may underline the shared representational techniques of law and film to reveal the vexed nature of accessing the truth in both realms ("Film = Law"). These three documentary strategies are defined in part by the stylistic choices the films make, and by the on- and off-screen performance of the filmmaker's relationship with his or her subject. Yet regardless of a particular documentary film style, the notion of the truth of depicted events is an inescapable element of the documentary narrative.

Download the full text from SSRN at the link.

Medical Humanities Blog

On The Relevance of Genetic Screening for Population Health

Posted: 20 Oct 2010 11:23 AM PDT

As this is Open Access Week, it is fitting to note yet another superb article appearing in PLoS Medicine, which is fast becoming my favorite medical journal. The article is entitled Being More Realistic about the Public Health Impact of Genomic Medicine and is, like all articles published in the journal, available full-text, open-access (with commenting function, to boot). There is no Abstract, but here are the Summary Points:

Before genomic information is used in public health screening, it must be shown that:

such information predicts disease risk better than phenotypic information;
cost-effective interventions exist for those at increased genetic risk;
these interventions are more cost-effective than population-level interventions;
genetic risk information motivates desired behaviour change.

Currently there are no examples of genetic screening for disease risk that satisfy these criteria.

A running theme on MH Blog has been my dubiety of the existence of close connections between genetic science/medicine and population health. The article persuasively underscores such doubts, and specifically does so in-context of the merits of a whole-population approach to public health (in contrast to the currently dominant high-risk approach, a subject I have touched on here).

The article is highly recommended.

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Law & Humanities Blog

Summer Institute in Legal History and Post-Doc at Wisconsin

Posted: 19 Oct 2010 08:59 AM PDT

Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at Wisconsin

Next two week biennial session will take place in June 2011; apply by 1/15/11.

Complete information and application instructions can be found at

http://law.wisc.edu/ils/hurst_institute.htm

The Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History is a biennial event sponsored by the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School in conjunction with the American Society for Legal History (ASLH). A committee appointed by the ASLH reviews applications from early-career faculty members, doctoral students with completed or nearly completed dissertations, and recent J.D. graduates demonstrating interest in an academic career with a focus on legal history, and selects 12 promising scholars as Institute Fellows. The Fellows come to Madison for two weeks in June to participate in daily seminars, meet other legal historians, and analyze and discuss each others work. Each biennial Institute is organized and chaired by senior legal historians and includes visiting scholars who lead specialized sessions.

The purpose of the Hurst Summer Institute is to advance the approach to legal scholarship fostered by J. Willard Hurst in his teaching, mentoring, and scholarship. The Hurst Summer Institute assists scholars from law, history, and other disciplines in pursuing research in legal history.

It also develops teaching skills by deepening the understanding of legal history and developing methods for incorporating it into the law school and undergraduate history curriculum. More importantly, it provides junior faculty a unique opportunity to work closely over an extended period of time with distinguished senior faculty and thus continue the tradition of excellence in research, teaching, and mentoring others. Finally, the Hurst Institute establishes relationships and cultivates a network of scholars for mutual support throughout their careers.

______________________________________________________________

Law and Society Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Wisconsin

One-year fellowship for early-career scholars who work in the "law and society" tradition and who will be competing for university-level teaching jobs in the U.S. market.

For 2011-12 academic year, apply by 1/7/11.

Complete information and application instructions can be found at:

http://law.wisc.edu/ils/lawandsocietyfellowship.html

The Institute for Legal Studies of the University of Wisconsin Law School will appoint a post-doctoral fellow for the 2010-11 academic year. We invite applications from scholars who are in the early (pre-tenure) stage of their career or whose careers have been interrupted or delayed. Eligibility is limited to humanities or social science scholars who work in the law and society tradition, for example, anthropologists, economists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists. Advanced ABD graduate students may apply, but the PhD must be completed before beginning the fellowship. The stipend will be $25,000, plus a research allowance of $5,000 and benefits that include health insurance.

The fellowship is designed to support a scholar at an early stage in his or her career when, under prevailing circumstances, career pressures or teaching responsibilities might divert the individual away from research. At the Institute, the Fellow will be able to devote most of his or her time to research and writing and will find a sympathetic and critical audience to support that work. Fellows are expected to be in full-time residence in Madison, to organize and lead a colloquium for graduate students, and to participate in the intellectual life of the Institute, which includes lectures, workshops, and conferences.

This fellowship is intended for early career social science and humanities scholars whose research contains a strong legal component and who plan to compete for a University teaching position in the U.S. market. Non-US citizens may apply, but must meet the stated criteria.

Howard S. Erlanger

Director, Institute for Legal Studies

Professor of Sociology &

Voss-Bascom Professor of Law

University of Wisconsin - Madison Read More... Law & Humanities Blog

Medical Humanities

The Language of Illness and Pain conference

Posted: 17 Oct 2010 05:45 AM PDT

The Language of Illness and Pain
Identity, Communication and the Clinical Encounter

Date: Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd July 2011
Venue: Birkbeck College, University of London

Following the establishment of the British medical profession in the nineteenth century, which endorsed the concept of medicine as a science, the clinical encounter between doctor and patient came to occupy a contested territory with equally contested boundaries. The period saw a theoretical and practical shift away from the classical perception of medicine as an art, based on the patient's story of his or her illness, to medicine as a science, based on the doctor's clinical observations and supported by the rapid increase in technical training and new scientific procedures.

Arguably the effect of this development was to suppress the patient's identity and voice. It also sidelined psychologically-driven theories, which were thought to lack evidence-based scientific rigour and were regarded as inferior to biomedical practice. As a result, conditions and identities associated with the troubled mind and with anti-social behaviours, for example, were pathologised to bring them into the province of orthodox treatments. The cure rate for the new taxonomies of stigmatised identities and psychosomatic conditions was disappointing. Moreover there was considerable confusion at the interface between the disciplines of law, medicine, psychology, and social science in relation to distinctions between normal behaviour and deviancy, between the criminal and the patient, and between the mad and the bad.

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to examine the legacy of these trends through the analysis of communication and language in the clinical encounter, as it is represented today in medicine and in the humanities. The objective is to break down the artificial boundaries between the arts and biomedical science to identify mutually beneficial fields of enquiry. In particular the conference aims to establish a forum in which academics, practitioners and students in the medical profession and in humanities can interrogate and evaluate the clinical encounter, the relationship between doctor and patient, and the language of illness and pain.

The intention is to publish a collection of the best conference papers in a medical humanities book that will be of interest to the general reader but which can also be used by students and academics in teaching and research.

The conference is the result of the collaboration between Medical Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London and the Kent, Surrey and Sussex Medical Deanery. It takes part over two days – Saturday and Sunday 2nd-3rd July 2011. Refreshments and lunches are provided and there will be a wine reception on Saturday, followed by a screening of Wit, the American TV drama based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson, directed by Nike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson. Formal presentations end at lunchtime on Sunday and will be followed in the afternoon by a talk at the British Museum in the Wellcome Trust-sponsored Living and Dying Room.

The conference will be supported by an exhibition, which will include books, music, and visual art, which explore representations of, and the creative interaction between medicine and the humanities throughout the ages.

CFP: We invite proposals (300 words max) for 20-minute papers from academics and practitioners in the fields of the humanities and medicine, which explore any aspect of communication, language, narrative, and representation in relation to illness and pain. Proposals for panels of three speakers are welcome.

The following list of ideas is intended as a guideline only:

Altered mental states
Collective illness, collective healing
Cultural perceptions of illness: gender, class, and ethnicity
Cure or healing?
Difference, otherness and pathologised identity
Identity and the 12-step programme
Illness, language and writing
Illness as metaphor
Illness and creativity / genius and madness
It's all in the mind
Medicine and anthropology
Medicine and music
Medicine and place: exteriors and interiors
Medicine and ritual
Medicine and visual culture
Narrative medicine and the clinical encounter
Narrative, identity and psychoanalysis
Narrative and the case history
The art of dying
The fictional doctor and patient
The medical autobiography / memoir
The Illness memoir
The language of pain
The language and lure of 'Bad Science'
The poetry of pain
Symbolic medicine: the staff of Asklepios and the caduceus of Hermes
Trauma and language
Western biomedicine and trans-cultural practices
Who owns the illness?

Format: Given the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, we would like papers to be accessible to all participants. If your proposal is accepted we will ask you to provide a short handout in advance of the conference, which includes an abstract that sets out your key arguments followed by brief definitions of terminology.

CPD points for clinicians: Given the contribution the conference will make to clinical practice, CPD credits may be claimed under your individual College guidelines.

The deadline for proposals is Friday 17th December. Please contact Debbie Harrison (d.harrison@bbk.ac.uk) and Jo Winning (j.winning@bbk.ac.uk). We would be delighted to discuss your ideas informally in advance. The website (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/research/research_conferences/language_illness_pain) will be updated regularly to provide further information about plenary speakers, accommodation options, parking arrangements etc. Birkbeck's facilities include wheelchair access. Read More... Medical Humanities

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Digital Excursion: Growing Knowledge Exhibition

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 09:35 AM PDT

We are pleased to invite you to the next UCL Digital Excursion, which will take place at the British Library on 25 October, 5.30 – 7.30 pm. By joining this Excursion, you will be the first to experience the “Growing Knowledge: The evolution of research” exhibition – an initiative designed to demonstrate the vision for future [...]

Digital Humanities MA/MSc showcased at NAIRTL/LIN Conference

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 01:41 AM PDT

The annual conference of Ireland’s National Academy for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (NAIRTL) and the Learning Innovation Network (LIN) took place in Dublin, Ireland on 6-7 October. My colleagues from University College Cork, Dan Blackshields and James Cronin, and I gave a paper at it that addressed some of the conditions that [...]

Medical Humanities Blog

On Historical Perspectives of Global Health

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 09:30 AM PDT

Headed by Christian Warren, the Section of the History of Medicine & Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine has been sponsoring a treasure trove of wonderful scholarships, lectures, and events for some years.

Now comes news of a Mini-Lecture Series on Historical Perspectives on Global Health, bringing together two of my very favorite things (history of medicine and population health). The details and registration information are available on the website, but I will post them here as well:

Global Health: Historical Perspectives

As part of our ongoing public lecture series in the history of medicine, this year the Historical Collections and the Section on the History of Medicine and Public health are presenting a three-part lecture series on global health, convened to complement the 9th International Conference on Urban Health to be held at the New York Academy of Medicine this October.

The lectures examine the historical dimension of global health in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Just as older ways of ordering the world's nations have changed dramatically — relying on colonial relations, Cold War hierarchies, or economic distinctions between industrialized and developing "worlds" — so too have core organizing principles around addressing health burdens around the globe. This transition is clear in the recent preference for "Global Health" over "International Health," the latter emphasizing differences, unilateral foreign aid, and medical missionary energy, the former stressing partnership, interdependence and common goals.

All lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures begin at 6:00 p.m.
and are preceded by light refreshments beginning at 5:30 p.m.
For complete details, visit:
http://www.nyam.org/library/pages/historical_collections_events

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

The Uneven Development of Knowledge about Lead Poisoning: Notes toward a Comparison between the U.S.

and Mexico

-Chris Sellers, MD, PhD, SUNY Stony Brook

Thursday, December 2, 2010
The Lilianna Sauter Lecture

The Republic of Therapy: AIDS in West Africa

-Vinh-Kim Nguyen, MD, MSc, PhD, Universite de Montreal

-Commentary by Jeffrey O'Malley, Director of the HIV/AIDS Group in the United Nations Development Programme

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Global Health and the Politics of Cooptation

-Anne-Emanuelle Birn, ScD, University of Toronto

---------------
Watch for more information about our other 2010-2011 lectures. The following speakers are on the calendar for this season:

Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The John K. Lattimer Lecture: Death Investigation in America

-Jeffrey M. Jentzen, MD, PhD, University of Michigan

Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Friends of the Rare Book Room Lecture: Vivisection in William Harvey's Century

-Domenico Bertoloni Meli, PhD, Indiana University - Bloomington

Thursday, April 14, 2011
The Iago Galdston Lecture: "Dangerous Pregnancies: German Measles (Rubella), Mothers, and Disabilities in Modern America"

-Leslie J. Reagan, PhD, University of Illinois

Monday, May 9, 2011
On the History of Hospital Architecture in New York City

-William J. Higgins, Higgins Quasebarth & Partners, LLC

----------------
This series received funding from the New York Council for the Humanities.
Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this lecture series do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For full descriptions, or to register to attend these talks, visit:
https://www.nyam.org/library/pages/historical_collections_events

For more information about the Historical Collections at the New York Academy of Medicine, please visit our website, http://www.nyam.org/library/pages/historical_collections .

For more information about the public lectures series sponsored by Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health, please call Arlene Shaner in the Rare Book Room at 212-822-7313 or send email to history@nyam.org.

___________________

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

A Public Memorial Service for Paul K. Longmore

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 06:02 AM PDT

As noted here previously, Paul Longmore, disability historian, scholar, and activist extraordinaire died on August 9th.

A public memorial service is planned at San Francisco State University, on October 23, 2010.

Details are available here.

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UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Reinventing the Record

Posted: 12 Oct 2010 01:51 PM PDT

The London Digital Humanities Group this evening played host to three members of the National Archives staff who shared current developments and future plans for their catalogue. The photo on the left references one of the key issues highlighted by Director of Technology and Chief Information Officer David Thomas – that of disambiguation. When a searcher looks [...]

Medical Humanities Blog

On Psychological Pain

Posted: 12 Oct 2010 06:42 AM PDT

David Biro, who is doing some excellent work on pain from a humanities perspective, has a new article out in Culture, Medicine, & Psychiatry (vol. 34, no. 4) entitled Is There Such a Thing as Psychological Pain? and Why It Matters. Here is the Abstract:

Medicine regards pain as a signal of physical injury to the body despite evidence contradicting the linkage and despite the exclusion of vast numbers of sufferers who experience psychological pain.

By broadening our concept of pain and making it more inclusive, we would not only better accommodate the basic science of pain but also would recognize what is already appreciated by the layperson—that pain from diverse sources, physical and psychological, share an underlying felt structure.

This is an excellent article, and well-worth reading, which puts a number of good challenges to dominant conceptualizations of pain in both medical and lay culture in the U.S. However, I generally remain concerned with efforts that proceed by accepting any dichotomy at all between psychological and so-called somatic pain, because there is excellent reason to believe the distinction between these two is ridiculous. Biro, I think, is well aware of the incoherence of the distinction, but I admit to anxiety about even referring to categories of pain in context of "physical" or "somatic" and "mental" or "psychological" pain. Using such categories, even to challenge them, risks conceding too much of importance, in my view. Howard Fields, who is both a clinician and one of the leading neuroscientists in the world on the subject of pain, said it best in a seminal 2007 essay: "All pain is mental."

One additional point is that there is a very real phenomenological difference to be drawn between different kinds of pain. Pain and suffering are phenomenologically distinct; it is possible to suffer without pain, and it is also possible, albeit perhaps less likely, to experience pain without suffering. So the idea Biro presents above, that psychological and physical pain are "flip sides of the same coin," as he puts it, does not commit him to the dubious position that the lived experiences of pain are invariant. Rather, the point is that the very real and significant phenomenological differences -- the many meanings of pain -- do not license a metaphysical distinction between mental and physical pain. If I am correct in attributing this position to him (which I flesh out at some length in my own work), he is exactly right.

Thoughts?

Call for Papers: Pennsylvania Medical Humanities Consortium Ninth Annual Meeting

Posted: 12 Oct 2010 06:33 AM PDT

Pennsylvania Medical Humanities Consortium
Ninth Annual Meeting
April 15 * 16, 2011

CALL FOR PROPOSALS Deadline: January 31, 2011

The Ninth Annual Pennsylvania Medical Humanities Consortium meeting will be held at Temple University School of Medicine, 3500 N. Broad St, Philadelphia, PA 19130, on Friday evening April 15 through Saturday afternoon, April 16, 2011.

To explore this year's theme, *The Story of Health and Illness in Urban America, *we are seeking abstracts of papers as well as proposals for panels, workshops, readings and performances that examine topics relevant to medicine and health care, preferably in the context of an urban environment.

The approach should represent the orientation of at least one of the medical humanities (e.g. history, literature, art, bioethics, philosophy, religious studies, disabilities studies, sociology, psychology, gender studies, and anthropology). Proposals should be of interest to a general audience (e.g. healthcare providers, humanities scholars, laypersons, students), and serve as a departure point for lively discussion.

All presenters must be registered conference participants. We particularly welcome submissions from students at all levels and from all relevant disciplines. The consortium focuses on collegial discussion and the sharing of ideas, so paper presentations should be brief--no more than 15 minutes--to allow for adequate discussion. Panels, workshops, readings and performances will be allotted more time, as the planning committee deems equitable, based on their content and number of participants.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

* The challenges unique to the provision of healthcare in increasingly multi-cultural settings

* The implications of healthcare reform on access to care

* Representations of health and illness in literature, art, photography, film, music, dance or mass media

* Evolving relationships between members of the health care team

* Shifting paradigms in the provision of primary care

* "Disability" and disabilities studies in historical context

* Gender issues in medicine and health care

* Patterns of illness and disease unique to urban settings

* Evolving perceptions of aging and "the good death"

* The "new" economics of health care

We welcome interdisciplinary work as well as that of single disciplines.

Please send abstracts and proposals (one page) electronically *as an attachment in Word, or as a PDF file by January 31, 2011 *to the review committee at: cubh@temple.edu, with the subject line 'PMHC 2011 Proposal'.

Additional information regarding the meeting will be forthcoming, and registration will open in mid-January. For general inquiries about submissions or the meeting itself, or to be added to our mailing list, please contact the planning committee at cubh@temple.edu.

Regards,
Ian G. Sheffer
Chair, Planning Committee

*The Pennsylvania Medical Humanities Consortium (PAMHC) is a diverse group of health practitioners, humanists, scholars, scientists, writers, and students who gather annually to discuss research and teaching in the medical humanities.*

__________________________

(h/t Lit&Med_ASBH)

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