Medical Humanities Blog

Call for Applications: MSc in Medical Humanities at King's College London

King’s College London offers a taught one year MSc programme exploring the links between the humanities and medicine, through the disciplines of Philosophy, Literature, Film, Ethics, Psychiatry and Art History. Among the questions it considers are: Does studying the humanities make us more humane? How are the humanities different from the sciences? What new angles do they offer on old ethical dilemmas? Students from medical, nursing, social work, as well as traditional humanities and science backgrounds – are taught interdisciplinary research skills and how to develop new perspectives on healthcare and illness across a wide range of courses.  Two fees-only bursaries are available for 2010-11.
 
King’s also offers opportunities to study any Medical Humanities specialisation at PhD level and to become part of the vibrant research community at the Wellcome Trust-funded Centre for the Humanities and Health.
 
Find out more about the MSc in Medical Humanities by visiting the King’s online prospectus at www.kcl.ac.uk/prospectus/graduate/medical_humanities
 
You can find out more about the research at the Centre for the Humanities and Health by visiting our website at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/groups/chh/

Slow Posting

I apologize for the dearth of posts.  There are many changes afoot in my life, mostly of a professional variety, and virtually all humbling and privileging.

I shall supply more details when appropriate, but for the next 10 days or so, blogging may be light (but not altogether absent).

Call for Papers: The Future of Medical History Conference

International Conference
The Future of Medical History
 
Announcement and Call for Papers
 
15th - 17th July 2010
 
Goodenough College, Bloomsbury, London
 
The Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine is hosting a three-day international conference on the future of the history of medicine. Papers are invited on the disciplinary and methodological challenges facing the field in all aspects of research and resourcing, not excluding media technologies and publishing.
 
The scope, breadth, and viability of the field as a whole in the 21st Century will be discussed in Panel Sessions on ‘The Neurological Turn’, ‘The Cultures of Food’, ‘The Place of Non-Humans in the Project of Medical Humanism’, ‘Asian Medicine’, and ‘Global Health’. Further suggestions for panels are welcome.
 
Papers should be 20 minutes, a selection of which will be published in Medical History. Please send an abstract of not more than 200 words to Lauren Cracknell (l.cracknell@ucl.ac.uk) by 1 June 2010.
 
Posters will also be welcomed.
 
Due to current circumstances, the Centre regrets that it is unable to cover the cost of travel or accommodation. Further details will soon be available on the Centre website (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/future_histmed).

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

1ST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MEDICAL IMAGING AND PHILOSOPHY: CHALLENGES, REFLECTIONS AND ACTIONS

_____

May 21st/22nd

Host:

Institute for the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine, Ulm University
Centre Medicine and Society, Ulm University

Location:

Villa Eberhardt

Ulm University

Heidenheimer Straße 80
D-89075 Ulm

Germany

Contact:

Sebastian Keßler

Centre Medicine and Society
Universität Ulm
Frauensteige 6 (Michelsberg)
D-89075 Ulm

Tel.: +49 731 500 39915

 

Email: sebastian.kessler@uni-ulm.de

URL:

http://www.uni-ulm.de/med/med-medgeschichte/oeffentliche-veranstaltungen/tag
ungen.html

 

  _____

Announcement:

Imaging plays a prominent role in contemporary medical research and
practice. This conference focusses 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.

Programme:

Friday May 21st, 2010

14:00-14:15:
Welcome
Heiner Fangerau (Ulm), Rethy Chhem (Vienna), Santiago Sia (Dublin)

14:15-14:45:
Opening lecture: Medical Imaging: Pictures and the Power of Evidence
Heiner Fangerau (Ulm), Irmgard Müller (Bochum)

14:45–16:45:
Session 1: Influence of different media of medical imaging on medical
evidence

- A Pathway to Pathways and Their Visualisations
Ludger Jansen (Rostock)

- Medical Imaging and Contemporary Art: Redefinition of the Human Body
Katsiaryna Laryionava (Aachen)

- The anatomical waxes in the early stage of smallpox vaccination
Fabio Zampieri (Padova)

- Early Film in Science and Medicine and the Experience of Time: Revisiting
Bergson's Philosophy in the Context of the Early Applications of Moving
Image Technologies
Martha Blassnigg (Plymouth)

17:15 – 19:45:
Session 2: The role of the image

- Keynote: Looking Behind the Image: Philosophical and Ethical Issues in
Medical Imaging
Santiago Sia (Dublin)

-Medical Imagery and the Ethics of Algorithms
Felicitas Kraemer, Kees van Overveld, Martin Peterson (Eindhoven)

- Why Images?
Megan Delehanty (Calgary)

- Is Epistemic Causality Relevant to Philosophy of Medical Imaging and
Philosophy of Medicine?
Rainhard Z. Bengez (München)

- Manifesting the Inner: Jastrow’s Automatograph and the inscription of
thought
Hannah Drayson (Plymouth)

 

Saturday May 22nd, 2010

10:00–12:00:
Session 3: Imaging constructs of physiology and pathophysiology

-Keynote: Norms of Health and Disease and the Understanding of the Body as
Shaped by Imaging Technologies
Shih-chang (Ming) Wang (Sydney)

- Pictorial Turns in Embryology: From Fetal Positions to the Human Egg
Ortrun Riha (Leipzig)

- Invisible Waves of Technology: Ultrasound and the Making of Fetal Images
Sonia Kiran Meyers (Madison)

- Ethical aspects of neuroimaging in psychiatry
Ilona Vera Szlezak (Freiburg)

13:30 – 15:00:
Session 4: Formalized ontologies in imaging

- Keynote: Philosophy of Radiology: The Ontological Challenge. The role of
formal ontologies in representation and communication with medical images.
James A. Overton (London, Ontario)

- (Im)mutable diagnostic technologies: the case of computed tomography
EunJeong Ma (Seoul)

- ‘Sehkollektive’ - Diagnostic Analysis of CT- Visualizations
Kathrin Friedrich (Köln)

- Image - Body - Knowledge. An interdisciplinary project on the critical
appraisal of images
Rainer-M.E. Jacobi (Essen), Sarah Sandfort (Bochum)

15:30 – 18:00:
Session 5: Imaging the brain

- Keynote: Medical Images: Imaging or Imagining?
Rethy Chhem (Vienna)

- NEUROIMAGING: Framing disorders, subjects, and identities from the 1980’s
to the present date
Simone do Vale (Rio de Janeiro)

- Reading in the Brain: From Medical Neuroimaging to Mind-Reading
Frederic Gilbert (Halifax, Canada)

- Functional neuroimaging of brain and mind
Kirsten Brukamp (Münster/Osnabrück)

- Imaging Pain: How Brain Ontology and Pain Representation Can Interact
Chuanfei Chin (Oxford)

18:00 – 18:30:
Summarising Comment: Retrospect and Perspectives and closing remarks
Heiner Fangerau (Ulm), Shih-chang (Ming) Wang (Sydney), Rethy Chhem
(Vienna), James Overton (London, Ontario)

The Conference will be held in English.

___________________________________________________________

It is just killing me that I will be unable to attend this conference.  In point of fact, most of my work (centering on ethics, population health, and the history of medicine) revolves around the power of the visible material pathology in the body, and the effects of that power across Western and American conceptions of health, illness, and the body.  I have given numerous talks on the overuse of medical imaging, and my dissertation is nothing if not an account of the connection (deep, IMO) between these ideas and the undertreatment of pain in the U.S.

I have even presented on these very ideas in Germany, as a member of an interdisciplinary research group on -- you guessed it -- ethics and the image of humanity, and will likely discuss these and other ideas as a fellow in residence in Germany this summer.  Unfortunately, I will not arrive in Germany until the middle of June, and I simply cannot change my schedule to arrive even a few weeks earlier.  Hence, disappointment.

In any case, this looks to be a marvelous conference, one that is obviously near and dear to my heart.  Perhaps, if I am fortunate, I will be able to attend the 2nd such conference!