Medical Humanities Blog

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Call for Papers: The Language of Illness and Pain: Identity, Communication and the Clinical Encounter Posted: 07 Feb 2011 07:09 AM PST Call for Papers: The Language of Illness and Pain: Identity, Communication and the Clinical Encounter Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd July 2011 Venue: Birkbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom 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 multidisciplinary and trans-historical conference seeks to examine the legacy of these trends through the analysis of communication and language in the clinical encounter, as it is represented 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 collection 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.