Medical Humanities Blog

Call for Papers: Bioethics in the field: The Social (Re)production of Bioethics in Diverse Cultural Contexts (Social Science & Medicine)

Guest Editors Patricia Kingori, Kristina Orfali and Raymond de Vries

Social Science & Medicine is seeking papers for a Special Issue that explores how the practical work of bioethics is undertaken in different cultural spaces.

Social science research on the globalization of biomedicine has described processes of adaption, appropriation and ‘localisation’, showing how biomedicine travels, survives, adapts, and is adopted in cross-cultural contexts; even among those whose cultural values which are opposed to the ideas associated with these new technologies. These accounts demonstrate that recipients of biomedicine are not passive actors, merely involved in its reproduction, but are active agents involved in producing locally appropriate variations.

Bioethics, the provider of the universal rules by which ‘ethical’ medical research should proceed, has also been adapted to different cultural and social contexts.  Feminist critiques of bioethics, for example, show how nurses have adapted seemingly rigid bioethical principles to fit in the context of caring relationships.  Other researchers suggest that bioethics can accommodate both communitarian and individualistic orientations and that it is aligned with different religious, social, legal, and ideological perspectives.  These examples illustrate the malleability of bioethics and the actors involved in its production. They also redirect attention to the practices and instruments that allow bioethics to “work” in different social and cultural contexts, offering new insights into the multiple meanings of ethical practice.

In keeping with the international scope of Social Science & Medicine we are assembling a collection of papers that analyze bioethical practice in a number of different countries and in the wider international context. We are looking for empirical and theoretical contributions which make a novel contribution, to advance discussions of the practice of bioethics around the globe. In particular, this Special Issue will broaden the scope of existing approaches to bioethics by examining bioethical work at the following levels: 

Micro – the everyday, “on the ground”, practice of bioethics.

Meso – institutional policies and practices that influence the way bioethics gets done.

Macro – the creation and implementation of national and international bioethics policies.

The Guest Editors of this Special Issue are Patricia Kingori (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), Kristina Orfali (Columbia University) and Raymond de Vries (University of Michigan).  Please contact patricia.kingori@lshtm.ac.uk for any queries regarding the Special Issue. The deadline for submissions is 31st January 2012. Authors should submit online at http://ees.elsevier.com/ssm/. When asked to choose article type, authors should stipulate ‘Special Issue: Bioethics’, and in the ‘Enter Comments’ box the title of the Special Issue should be inserted, plus any further acknowledgements.  All submissions should meet Social Science & Medicine author guidelines (also available at http://ees.elsevier.com/ssm/).

(h/t H-MEDANTHRO)

On the Relative Priority of Genetic vs. Social Causes of Disease for Population Health and Inequities

Daniel S. Goldberg (East Carolina University) has a new article out in Eä: Journal of Medical Humanities & Social Studies of Science and Technology 3, no. 1 (2011).  The article is entitled Population Health & Genetic vs. Social Causes of Disease: Matters of Relative Priority, and like all material in Eä, is available full-text open-access.  Here is the Abstract:

This article critiques the effort to disentangle genetic from social causes of disease, but also argues that rough assessments of the relative effect each set of factors makes in shaping patterns of disease and inequities is both possible and is ethically recommended. The essay is divided into two main sections. The first provides the theoretical critique of the genetic-social causal dichotomy as to disease. The second offers the empirical critique of the same dichotomy, and moves on to consider the implications of this empirical evidence for priority-setting in public health policy. Ultimately, because theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that social causes are of much greater significance than genetic causes in causing disease and inequities in populations, even where measures intended to address both sets of causes should be supported, greater resources and attention should be directed to influencing social causes than genetic causes.

As always, comments and feedback are most welcome.

 

On the Natural History and Suggested Management of Psychosomaticism

I am very pleased to be able to feature a piece of original writing here on MH Blog, authored by Julia Geynisman, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Michigan.  The piece is entitled "The Natural History and Suggested Management of Psychosomaticism."  Ms. Geynisman was kind enough to permit me to post a copy of her interesting and insightful meditation, which I will excerpt here:

. . . overwhelmingly, patients with psychosomatic illnesses have some degree of mental anguish. They are battling depression or are living with anxiety. They have a history of one major trauma or have lived lives of daily trauma. They have unresolved conflicts with others or unfulfilled aspirations; they may need validation about the choices they have made. In an era in which we have functional MRIs to help us study every neuron of the brain and in which we know so much about the molecular mechanisms of our bodies, how can we reconcile the normal results of our scans and lab tests with the tired eyes, weak gait, and crippled spirit of the patient before us? Psychosomatic disorders challenges us to sit with the uncomfortable question of whether we believe our mind and body are two separate entities or one whole organism.

What follows is an elegant meditation on the lived experiences of so-called psychosomatic illnesses, and on the problems posed by the apparent necessity of the biological model of illness that rests fundamentally on the existence of discrete, material pathologies that can be clinically correlated.  Because I believe that the foundations of this model in Western allopathic medicine have had devastating consequences for the family of contested illnesses that do not typically present with such pathologies, readers should be unsurprised that I found so much to like in Ms. Geynisman's essay.

One of the most important aspects in thinking about the relationship between mind and body is subjectivity, which is something of an allegory for the medical and health humanities insofar as studies in the latter often begin by centering the subject rather than objectifying.  To that end, the writer is always a critical feature of a medical humanities analysis, and Ms. Geynisman was kind enough to write a short account of how and why she came to be interested in the concept of psychsomaticism.

This account is at once personal, heartfelt, and well-written, like the essay itself.  In the combination of subjectivity, judgment, and the use of erudition as a means of encouraging virtuous engagement with the world -- Ms. Geynisman is interested in this subject at least in part because of its implications for her future practice as a physician -- Ms. Geynisman's work exemplifies the best features of the essay form itself.

Comments and thoughts are of course most welcome, posted here or directed to Ms. Geynisman herself.  The essay may be downloaded here:

Download The Natural History and Suggested Management of Psychosomaticism - FINAL

The account describing the rationale for writing the essay may be downloaded here:

Download Comment Geynisman Psychosomaticism

Call for Papers: The History of Pain Without Lesion in the Mid-to-Late 19th c. West

Please note the following CFP, which I am especially proud to have a hand in organizing.  This will be tacked to the top of MH Blog for a while.  Hopefully, I'll have more to say about my Visiting Fellowship with The Birkbeck Pain Project in future posts.

Call for Papers: The History of Pain Without Lesion in the Mid-to-Late 19^th c. West

Background:

The Birkbeck Pain Project invites the submission of abstracts in connection with a public Workshop to be held on 19 May 2012 at The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London entitled “The History of Pain Without Lesion in the Mid-to-Late 19^th c. West.”  The Workshop is being organised by Visiting Fellow Daniel S. Goldberg, J.D., Ph.D (East Carolina University, U.S.A.). 

Although much work in the history of medicine and science has touched on experiences of pain in the modern era, there is a paucity of scholarship specifically focused on prevailing attitudes, practices, and beliefs among either lay or professional therapeutic communities regarding pain itself in the 19^th c. West.  The Workshop is intended to help fill this gap by generating discussion and knowledge exchange on the mid-to-late 19^th c. social, cultural, and medical status of what we might now refer to as chronic pain sufferers.  Of course, given fluid nosologies during most of the 19^th century, a variety of labels and complaints might refer to kinds of chronic nonmalignant pain, including but not limited to causalgia, neuralgia, neurasthenia, hysteria, railway spine, spinal irritation, spinal concussion, headache, dysmenorrhea, and pain without lesion.  The last phrase has been selected as an umbrella term for convenience, but in the ambiguity and fluidity of terms for and conceptions of pain, 19^th c. pain sufferers, healers, and families are not so different from current counterparts given that chronic pain defies categories, definitions, and sometimes even descriptions.

Themes & Topics:

Work on the history of pain without lesion in the mid-to-late 19^th c. West implicates inquiries, among others, in the history of neurology and neuroscience, the history of objectivity, the history of the body, disability history, the history of railway medicine/surgery, and the history of pathological anatomy.  Papers addressing the Workshop topic within these or other relevant domains are welcome.   

Solely by way of example rather than limitation, possible paper topics might include (all in context of pain without lesion):

• Attitudes, practices, and beliefs in early or nascent clinical neurology;
• The role of changing conceptions and frameworks of objectivity;
• The role of mind-body dualism, especially in a Victorian context;
• The influence of specificity theory in cognitive neuroscience;
• The effects of increasing emphasis on cerebral, nervous, and somatic localization;
• The increasing significance of lesions that could be clinically correlated in discourses of pathological anatomy;
• The effects of dominant structures of race, class, gender, and impairment in shaping attitudes, practices, and beliefs; and
• How contests over railway spine reveal attitudes, practices, and beliefs.

Papers oriented around interdisciplinary approaches in the medical & health humanities are welcome so long as they primarily adopt a mid-to-late 19^th c. focus for their analysis.  The geographical focus of the Workshop is on the Great Britain, Ireland, and the U.S., but papers addressing the Workshop themes in context of any Western region, nation, or community are welcome.

Format:

This Workshop aims to generate dialogue and knowledge exchange in an integrative, discussion-oriented format.  To maximize the quality of the discussion and to facilitate meaningful feedback, each speaker will be required to provide drafts of their papers to participants in advance of the workshop.   The Workshop will not include traditional paper panels.  Rather, speakers will present as a conversant in tandem with another speaker on a unified theme, after which a chaired group discussion will proceed for the majority of the time allotted for the session.  The hope is that this format stands a higher likelihood of generating integrated, meaningful, and sustained discourse on a variety of issues related to the 19^th c. history of pain and the potential relevance of that history for contemporary problems in understanding and treating pain.

Logistics:

The Workshop is hosted by The Birkbeck Pain Project and will take place at The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.  There is no fee to attend or register for the Workshop.  Speakers are expected to assume the costs of their participation, although a limited number of small bursaries are available.  Those wishing to be considered for a bursary should note as such and offer a brief explanation; preference will be given to current students and/or those most in need. 

To submit, please send an abstract (maximum 450 words) and a C.V. via email to the Birkbeck Pain Project (painproject@bbk.ac.uk) by 30 November 2011.  Please note that Abstracts which are sent in after this deadline cannot be considered.

Questions and concerns regarding the Call may be directed to the Birkbeck Pain Project (painproject@bbk.ac.uk) and/or to Daniel S. Goldberg (goldbergd@ecu.edu).

More information regarding The Birkbeck Pain Project is available on the Project website (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-research/birkbeckpainproject).