Medical Humanities Blog

Call for Papers: 1st International Conference on Medical Imaging and Philosophy:

1st International Conference on Medical Imaging and Philosophy:
Challenges, Reflections and Actions

May 21-22, 2010, Villa Eberhardt, Ulm

Call for Abstracts

Imaging plays a prominent role in contemporary medical research and practice. This conference will focus on three related aspects of imaging the human body, demonstrating a range of cultural, historical and scientific concerns:

• Scientific representations
• Ontologies
• Ethics

It is the aim of the conference to reconstruct methods of diagnostic knowledge and their social, anthropological and technological origins and future implications. Among the topics to be discussed are:

• the production of knowledge using imaging techniques, and the commensurability of that knowledge across imaging modalities;

• experimental systems and the role of data and data collection for medical diagnosis and communication;

• the role of formal ontologies in representation and communication with medical images;

• norms of health and disease and the understanding of body (and mind) as they are shaped by imaging technologies;

• the interdependence of technology, medicine, economics and engineering.

This wide-ranging conference will include plenary lectures from eminent scholars in the field, panel seminars, author-meets-critics sessions, outreach activities, and social receptions.

Individual papers are invited in all areas concerned with “Medical Imaging and Philosophy: Challenges, Reflections and Actions”, broadly construed.

Proposed submissions for papers should outline the interdisciplinary dimensions and perspectives of the above mentioned connections between scientific representations, ontologies and ethics.

Submissions should include an abstract (max. 250 words) and full contact details of the presenting author.  Submissions should be sent, preferably in MS Word or plain text format, to heiner.fangerau@uni-ulm.de

Abstract Deadline: February 1st

Scientific Committee: Heiner Fangerau (Ulm University), Rethy K Chhem (Ulm University), Irmgard Müller (Bochum), Santiago Sia (Milltown Institute, Dublin), Cesare Romagnoli (University of Western Ontario), James Overton (University of Western Ontario), Robert Lindenberg (Harvard Medical School, Boston), Shih-chang (Ming) Wang (University of
Sydney)

_____________________________________________________

The power of the visible, material pathology is central to my work in both public health ethics and in the history of medicine.  Specifically in the former, my research on pain centers on the role of seeing the pathology that can be clinically correlated with the pain symptom, and in the latter, I am fascinated by the history of medical imaging techniques in Western clinical practice (especially the history of the X-ray).  I do have plans to be in Germany sometime this summer, although I am uncertain if I can get there by late May.  In any case, this looks to be a fascinating conference.

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

Call for Papers: Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels

Ian Williams brings word of a fascinating Call for Papers for a one-day conference scheduled for June 17, 2010, in London, UK, on Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels.

Details regarding the Conference itself, including how to submit proposals, are available on the Conference website.

Call for Papers: Eä – Journal of Medical Humanities & Social Studies of Science and Technology

One of the more interesting and promising new journals out there has issued a call for papers for vol. 1, no. 3.  Here is the Call:

We are calling for papers for Eä – Journal of Medical Humanities & Social Studies of Science and Technology, Vol. 1 Nº 3 - April 2010.

Next deadline for submitting papers will be January 15, 2010.

Information for authors is available at the Information for authors section of our website. Any enquiries please contact us to submit@ea-journal.com.

Eä, a periodical electronic journal in an interactive format publishing papers on Medical Humanities and Social Studies of Science and Technology, is available permanently at www.ea-journal.com, and aims to be in the junction between academic excellence and the development of the new technologies of information and social networks. The journal gathers a prestigious editorial committee, is peer reviewed by international referees and meets the requirements of periodical publications indexes. It publishes three issues a year (April, August, and December), is presented in Spanish and English, and accepts texts in Spanish, English, Portuguese and French, reaching global impact. This publication has been created under the Web 2.0 paradigm, with a dynamic layout that promotes user-reader’s interaction between them and with the website.

We invite you to go through our contents as well as through the news that are permanently updated in our website, and to submit papers for publication for our next issue.

Yours sincerely,

Jaime Elías Bortz, Academic Director

Gabriela Mijal Bortz, Editorial Director

Call for Applications: Brocher Foundation

CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR VISITING RESEARCHERS IN 2011

Write a book, articles, an essay or your PhD thesis in a peaceful environment on the shore of the Lake of Geneva in 2011

Have the opportunity to meet other researchers from different disciplines and countries

Have the opportunity to meet experts from numerous International Organizations & Non Governmental Organizations based in Geneva (WHO, WTO, WIPO, UNHCR, ILO, WMA, ICRC, …)

THE BROCHER RESIDENCIES
The Brocher Foundation residencies last between one and six months. They give researchers the opportunity to work at the Brocher Centre on projects on the ethical, legal and social implications for humankind of recent medical research and new technologies. In 2011 the Brocher Centre will  host up to ten researchers at any one time.

The Brocher Foundation offers to successful applicants an accommodation in the Villa Brocher, an office with all working facilities  and a dinner with the other guests every evening. It also covers a plane or train ticket in economy class to Geneva (round trip) up to a maximum amount (cf “Statute for visiting researchers” available on www.brocher.ch). 

“Junior” visiting researchers can  apply for a scholarship in order to cover their local expenses in Geneva. This scholarship amounts to 33 Swiss francs a day (per diem). To be eligible, the applicant should be a PhD student or should have obtained his PhD degree in 2006 or later and should not perceive any other income during the time spent at the Foundation. Developing a research project involving cooperation with a Swiss university, an European university, a non-governmental organization or an international organization will be considered as an advantage. A researcher can apply with one or two other researchers to work on a collaborative project together.

TOPICS FOR THE YEAR 2011

Ethical, Legal & Social Implications of recent medical research and new medical technologies :

 Among the following disciplines

Bioethics, Health Anthropology, Health Economics, Health Governance, Health Law, Health Philosophy, Health Psychology, Health Sociology, Medical Ethics , History of medicine

Ethical, Legal & Social Issues on the following topics:

Access to medicines, Biobanks, Biosecurity and Dual Use Dilemma, Clinical Trials and Research on Human Subjects, Genetic testing and screening, Health Care Reform,  Nanotechnology, Neglected disease, Pandemic planning Reproduction & Technology, Stem Cells, Transplantation

HOW TO APPLY
To apply, please complete the application form available at www.brocher.ch and send it by e-mail to scientificprog@brocher.ch

and

by mail to Fondation Brocher

471 Rte d’Hermance

CP 70

CH - 1248 Hermance

Switzerland

The deadline for submission is the 18th of January 2010
 
MORE INFORMATION
 
For more information about this call for proposals please visit the Brocher Foundation website www.brocher.ch or contact our staff at scientificprog@brocher.ch.

__________________________________________

Sounds amazing.

Call for Papers: Disability History (UK)

Disability History Conference 2010

Disability History: looking forward to a better past?
June 25th - 27th, 2010

University of Central Lancashire
Preston, UK

Plenary Speakers:
Professor Catherine J Kudlick, University of California, Davis Professor Tom Shakespeare, University of Newcastle

Disability history has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular sub-discipline of historical research, covering social, cultural, medical, practical, gendered, technological and linguistic aspects of the lives of those seen by society as having ‘disabled’ bodies and minds. The Disability History Group are pleased to announce their latest conference. ‘Disability History: looking forward to a better past?’ which promotes the DHG’s goal to advance research into the history of disability. It is hoped the conference will broaden the scope of disability history and deliver fresh and dynamic perspectives on the way disability has been used to legitimate and understand norms, social relations, inequality, and oppression. This includes historical research into individuals, groups and institutions, as well as representations/constructions and perspectives on disability.

The overarching theme of this conference is ‘Where are we, how did we get here and where are we going next?’. To this end, the conference is dedicated to an evaluation of all aspects of disability history at regional, national and international levels. In ‘looking forward to a better past’, the DHG hopes to encourage lively and informed debate on the current state of disability history; how the discipline has emerged and arrived at this point; and where scholars working in the discipline will go in the future. However, paper topics are not prescriptive - we invite potential speakers to consider the ways that their current research has emerged and its context within the sub-discipline of disability history.

The DHG invites panel or individual contributions from scholars and postgraduates working in this field, and is keen to consider papers on a wide range of topics. Papers covering all aspects of disability history, as well as papers on the historical and future development of disability history, are welcomed.

Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to Dr Martin Atherton:
matherton1@uclan.ac.uk by March 31, 2010.

(h/t H-DISABILITY)

On Eugenics, Castration of Dwarfs, and Consent

Paul Lombardo (Georgia State - Law) has uploaded a new paper to SSRN entitled Tracking Chromosomes, Castrating Dwarves: Uninformed Consent and Eugenic Research (full-text download available).  Here is the Abstract:

In 1929 Charles B. Davenport, a prominent biologist and leader in the American eugenics movement, carried out an experimental castration of a "Mongoloid dwarf" at a New York State mental institution. His goal was to retrieve tissue for chromosomal analysis in an attempt to understand the basis of syndromal mental retardation. Davenport was assisted in the research by cytologist T.S. Painter, who later achieved scientific celebrity for his work in counting human chromosomes. Davenport also invited George Washington Corner, who eventually contributed to the discovery of progesterone, to participate in the experiment. Davenport planned and carried out the surgery using the questionable promise of therapeutic benefit to elicit consent from a parent with limited mental capacity on behalf of an even more seriously impaired institutional resident. Archival evidence demonstrates that even at that date scientists like Davenport and the physicians he collaborated with were sensitive to ethical issues such as the necessity for consent and questions of decisional capacity, as well as the potential for negative publicity for mistreatment of "research subjects."

I had the pleasure of listening to a talk on the history of eugenics Dr. Lombardo gave at the AAHM 2009 Meeting, and of chatting with him for a bit afterwards.  He is a gentleman and a scholar, and anything he writes on the history of American eugenics is worth reading immediately.

On Models of Causation in Epidemiology

Alex Broadbent (History and Philosophy of Science, Univ. Cambridge) has a fascinating new article out in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.  The title is Causation and Models of Disease in Epidemiology.  Here is the Abstract:

Nineteenth-century medical advances were entwined with a conceptual innovation: the idea that many cases of disease which were previously thought to have diverse causes could be explained by the action of a single kind of cause, for example a certain bacterial or parasitic infestation. The focus of modern epidemiology, however, is on chronic non-communicable diseases, which frequently do not seem to be attributable to any single causal factor. This paper is an effort to resolve the resulting tension. The paper criticises the monocausal model of disease, so successful in the nineteenth century. It also argues that a multifactorial model of disease can only be satisfactory if it amounts to more than a mere rejection of the monocausal model. A third alternative, the contrastive model, is proposed and defended on the grounds that it links the notions of disease and of general explanation, while avoiding the philosophical naiveties and practical difficulties of the monocausal model.

I read (and then reread) the paper last night, and will offer some comments.  By way of context, I should say that I have been interested in causation for most of my adult life (my undergraduate thesis was on causation in science).  Part of the reason for my continued interest is the relevance of illness causality [sic] for the social determinants of health.  If the best evidence suggests that the primary causes of health and illness in populations are social and economic conditions, it follows that our public health priorities -- in a normative sense -- ought to be remediation of these conditions.

Turning to the article, as a piece of philosophy, it is a tour de force, one of the best treatments of illness causation I have reviewed since K. Codell Carter's seminal books (Broadbent cites Carter extensively).  I have some minor quibbles with the argument structure itself, but it strikes me as generally persuasive, particularly in its documentation of the myriad problems of what Broadbent terms the monocausal model of illness causality.

However, I had two qualms about the remainder of the essay, one fairly technical, the other, more related to the pragmatics of public health policy.  Broadbent distinguishes between what he terms the "bare" and the "contentful" models of multifactorial causation.  The bare model, he argues, is intended solely as the negation of the monocausal model.  Accordingly, he writes,

"saying that diseases are multifactorial -- have many causes -- is trivially true, because everything that is caused is multifactorial.  Since it is trivially true of any caused event, the multifactorial approach cannot possibly identify any distinctive feature of disease, and so cannot be methodologically helpful in this way" (306).

I am uncertain that this conclusion follows.  Namely, nothing about the fact that diseases have many causes requires that all causes have equal causal significance.  I see no inherent reason why an event D could not be caused by causes C1-C12, but where C10, C11, and C12 seem to have much greater causal responsibility in bringing about event D.  In fact, this is precisely what seems to be the case in thinking about disease on the population level: lack of access to acute care services may, for example, causally contribute to a latent infection entering an acute phase, but the larger patterns of that disease occurring on the population level -- including in that particular person -- are primarily determined by social and economic conditions.

Perhaps Broadbent might respond by noting that, in its assertions that some causes are more significant than others in thinking about disease, the excessively crude account I have sketched here qualifies as a "contentful" multifactorial model.  If that is the case, I have no real objection, but note then that the bare multifactorial model is generally not, at least in the social epidemiologic literature I am familiar with, entertained as a serious candidate for a model of disease causality.

So much for the technical objection.  The pragmatic reservation I have concerns Broadbent's positive model of disease, what he terms a contrastive model.  The basic idea, as I understand it, is that to have a disease (1) one must have a set of symptoms S which differ in the person P from a contrast class X; and (2) at least some of the causes of S are not causes of the absence of S. 

"For example, to have cholera, you must exhibit some symptoms of ill health which a certain contrast class does not have, such as diarrhoea; and these symptoms must be caused by a certain specified cause, namely, the activity of vibrio cholerae in your small intestine" (307).

I have no problems with the argument structure per se, but am concerned that this account gives short shrift to the discursive nature of causal attributions.  Specifically, Hume teaches us that causal attributions are inherently subjective in the sense that it is subjects who supply the causal inferences.  Since causal attributions are subjective conventions, it follows that a panoply of social and cultural factors affect which causal explanations we approve and reject.  This is well-documented in the history of disease explanations, particularly in the work of Carter, Christopher Hamlin, Charles Rosenberg, and Margaret Humphreys.  To his credit, Broadbent acknowledges this, but suggests the debate over the value-ladenness of disease causality obscures a "different and perhaps even more important methodological issue . . . ." (310).  I see great merit to what Broadbent is trying to accomplish, but respectfully disagree that such an analysis is more important than analysis of the ways in which causal attributions of disease are socialized.

More importantly, however, Broadbent acknowledges that the charge of "biological chauvinism," or the idea that emphasis is directed away from the SDOH to "biological" factors, is equally applicable to his model as it is to the monocausal model.  (Sidenote: I eschew the rhetorical tendency to speak of "biological" and "social" causes of illness, since one of the fundamental ontological lessons of the SDOH literature is that there is no such thing as "biological" causes that are truly separable from "social" and "environmental" factors.  The biological is the social).

Broadbent's response to this objection is that he is focused on the narrower question of disease causation rather than the larger question of illness causation, and that the concerns of the SDOH proponents may be entirely correct, but do not apply to the study of disease causality as he defines it.  This is fine, as far as it goes, but as a public health ethicist, my concern is that it does not go very far.  That is, in proferring a philosophically rigorous account of disease causality, Broadbent is performing a very great service indeed.  But for those of us focused on identifying our normative priorities in ameliorating human suffering on the population level, the distinction between disease and illness that Broadbent draws (which is quite different from the similar distinction widely utilized in medical humanities discourse) may not have all that much significance.  If it is the case that the vast majority of illness burdens in both the developed and the developing world are primarily caused by social and economic conditions, then our normative priority should be to ameliorate those conditions.  No?

In any case, these concerns hardly detract from the rigor and quality of Broadbent's article.  Highly recommended! 

Call for Proposals: Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture: Engaging Publics and Pedagogies

CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Conference: “Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture: Engaging Publics and Pedagogies”

November 19-20, 2010
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Conference Co-Chairs:
Sarah Brophy, Associate Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Janice Hladki, Associate Professor, School of the Arts, McMaster University

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: January 15, 2010

CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION:
This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore how visual cultural practices image and imagine unruly bodies and, in so doing, respond to Patricia Zimmermann's call for “radical media democracies that animate contentious public spheres” (2000, p. xx). Our aim is to explore how health, disability, and the body are theorized, materialized, and politicized in forms of visual culture including photography, video art, graphic memoir, film, body art and performance, and digital media. Accordingly, we invite proposals for individual papers and roundtables that consider how contemporary visual culture makes bodies political in ways that matter for the future of democracy. Proposals may draw on fields such as: visual culture, critical theory, disability studies, health studies, science studies, autobiography studies, indigenous studies, feminisms, queer studies, and globalization/transnationalism.

CONFERENCE EVENTS:
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
*Rebecca Belmore,* internationally recognized Anishinabekwe artist, Vancouver (exhibitions of her performance, video, installation, and sculpture include: Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts);
*Lisa Cartwright,* Professor of Communication and Science Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Gender Studies, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego (/Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture/; /Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child/)
*Robert McRuer,* Professor and Deputy Chair, Department of English, George Washington University, Washington, DC (/Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability/; /The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities/);
*Ato Quayson,* Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto (/Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation/; /Relocating Postcolonialism/).

The conference will also feature /Scrapes: Unruly Embodiments in Video Art,/ an exhibition curated by Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki, at the McMaster Museum of Art.

POSSIBLE THEMATICS:
1. Technologies
-- medical technologies (e.g. medical imaging, drug therapies, prosthetics and other devices) and their implications for embodiment, subjectivity, community, kinship, and politics
-- corporeality and the senses as sites/forms of knowledge-making
-- biopolitics and surveillance
-- the relationship between “old” and “new” technologies
-- how technologies mediate social spaces of embodiment and interaction
-- interrogations of the human and posthuman in medicine, science, and art

2. Cultural Production
-- cultural pedagogy; the production of knowledge in sites of cultural production (e.g. galleries, festivals, classrooms, online, etc.)
-- counter-publics (e.g. disability culture)
-- indigenous modes of cultural production
-- diasporic/transnational issues and practices
-- new representational modes (e.g. digital arts, graphic memoir)
-- documentary practices
-- “doing politics in art” (Bennett)

3. Disability
-- medical, scientific, and cultural discourses of disability
-- performing and witnessing embodied difference
-- interrogations of impairment
-- genetics, reproduction, eugenics
-- dis-ease and disorder
-- “ability trouble” (McRuer)
-- “radical crip images” (McRuer)

4. Affect
-- explorations of “ugly feelings” (Ngai), “aesthetic nervousness” (Quayson), “moral spectatorship” (Cartwright), “empathic vision” (Bennett), and “seeing for” (Bal)
-- relationships to medicalization, regulation, and surveillance
-- affect as generative/productive in relation to concepts of ethical spectatorship and witnessing
-- relationships between corporeality and theorizations of nature as dynamic and agentic (Barad, Grosz, Haraway)
-- can we/should we move beyond the theories that posit /negative/ affect as a prime site for ethics?
-- affect and global politics: representations of global mobilities, violence, war, terrorism

HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL:
We kindly invite submissions from scholars, artists, health professionals, community members, and activists in all areas and disciplines.
Concurrent sessions will be 90 minutes in length. Proposals for the following formats will be considered:
1) Individual papers: 15 minutes in length
2) Roundtables: 4-5 participants, including a designated moderator and a plan for facilitated discussion of ideas
All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Individual paper submissions should include:
1) affiliation and contact information
2) a biographical note of up to 200 words
3) paper title and a 300-500 word abstract; the description of the paper’s content should be as specific as possible and indicate relevance to one or more of the conference thematics.
4) details of audiovisual needs (e.g. DVD, LCD projection, and/or VHS). Note that participants will need to bring their own laptops.

Roundtable submissions should include:
1) affiliation and contact information for each participant
2) a biographical note of up to 200 words for each participant
3) roundtable title and a 500 word proposal. The proposal should both indicate the relevance of the roundtable to one or more of the conference thematics and outline the organization of the proposed discussion.
4) details of audiovisual needs (e.g. DVD, LCD projection, and/or VHS). Note that participants will need to bring their own laptops.

All submissions should be sent via email attachment to viscult@mcmaster.ca<mailto:viscult@mcmaster.ca> by January 15, 2010. Please use the subject line “proposal for Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture.” Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats.

If electronic submission is not possible, please mail or fax proposals to arrive by January 15, 2010.
Address: Sarah Brophy & Janice Hladki: Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture Conference
c/o Department of English & Cultural Studies
Chester New Hall 321
McMaster University
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L9
Fax: 905-777-8316

ACCESSIBILITY:
Presenters are encouraged to explore ways to make physical, sensory, and intellectual access a fundamental part of their presentation. Suggestions include: large print (18 point font) copies of handouts, large-print copies of paper or panel outlines, and/or audio descriptions of any film or video clips and images. Presenters are also encouraged to consider open or closed captioning of films and video clips.

POST-CONFERENCE PUBLICATION PLANS:
Papers from the conference will be considered for a special issue of /The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies/.

CONFERENCE SPONSORSHIP:
Sponsored by the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (John Douglas Taylor Fund)

Conference: Drugs, Standards, & Chronic Illness

The Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester is holding a two-day conference on 27-28 November, 2009, on Drugs, Standards, & Chronic Illness.  The lineup of speakers and topics is truly awe-inspiring for anyone even remotely interested in the topic (which should be virtually everyone who reads this blog!).

The program is available in HTML here, and as a PDF here.

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

On Medicine & Classicism from a Comparative Perspective

David Arnold and Peter Pormann (University of Warwick) have recorded a wonderful podcast to accompany their upcoming conference (program available here as a PDF) at the Warburg Institute.  Here is the description of the podcast:

Medical systems often resorted to constructing a classical past in order to shape and legitimise current medical theory and practice. This wish to forge a classical tradition appears to be a truly global and diachronic phenomenon.  Greek doctors in particular served as a model of reference for many variegated cultures and societies. In second-century Rome, tenth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Florence, and eighteenth-century London, physicians used Hippocrates as a medical authority and deferred to him as the ‘father of medicine’.  Other ‘classical’ authors emerged in various contexts: Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) became the ‘prince of physicians’ during the medieval period in the Latin West and Arabic- and Persian-speaking East. The Indian and Chinese medical systems selected and constructed their own classics.  Moreover, even today, the appeal to a classic such as Avicenna can sanction medical practice in so-called ‘traditional’ health system found in the Middle East, Africa, or India.  But what does it mean to be a medical ‘classic’? How do different cultures forge their own medical tradition through references to classical authors? And how does medical classicism impact on current health practices?

(h/t MEDMED-L)