Le genre, la médecine et le corps

Gender, Medicine and the Body

Symposium

13-14 March 2015

In March 2014 an inaugural one-day Medical Humanities symposium was held at the Royal Irish Academy. It brought together representatives from all the Irish medical schools and institutes of humanities to discuss the current state of the art in the field in teaching and research. It bore fruitful collaborations and the proceedings will be published in 2016. 

Building on its success the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin will host the second in the series entitled Gender, Medicine and the Body, on 13 and 14 March 2015. This symposium, organised by Dr Ciara Breathnach, UL and Dr Catherine Lawless, Director of the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies with the able assistance of Ailish Veale, draws together established and early-career scholars in the fields of medicine, philosophy, history, English literature, languages, music therapy and ethics. The papers span from the ancient to the modern world and the invited participants have been asked to consider ‘the somatic turn’ to question what studies of the gendered body can add to our understanding of the evolution of medicalisation and well being.

As a burgeoning field of teaching and research, medical humanities offers several opportunities for early-career scholars in the arts and humanities but this will only occur if cross-disciplinary engagement is carefully nurtured. This symposium aims to support the growth of inter-institutional and collaborative research. The other two key topics we will address during the course of the symposium and in our round table discussion are: interdisciplinarity in nascent fields, how/can it work? How do we build meaningful research eco-systems in Medical Humanities?

This symposium will mark the official launch of an Irish-Scottish research network in Medical Humanities. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Trinity Long Room Hub, Research Incentive Scheme and the Wellcome Trust, Small Project Grant scheme.

Friday 13 March 2015

8.30-9.00am: Registration.

9.00-11.00: Session I: Practitioner/patient narratives and dialogues.

Chair: Professor Oonagh Walsh, Glasgow Caledonian University.

Ciara Breathnach, UL, ‘Seán Ó Ríordáin: pulmonary disease, ‘professional patienthood’, 1938-1977’.

Steven Wilson, QUB, ‘Medicine’s ‘technocultural revolution’: the ethics and dynamics of the patient blog’.

Des O’Neill, TCD, ‘How cultural and narrative gerontology can inform the medical humanities’.

Charlotte Blease,UCD,‘The dangers of commonsense’.

11.00-11.15: Coffee break

1.15-12.45: Session II: Beliefs, healing and healers.

Chair: Professor Brendan Kelly.

Christine Morris, TCD, ‘Healing on the mountain: anatomical votives from Bronze Age Crete’.

Andrew Sneddon, ‘Witchcraft, medicine and gender in early modern Ireland’.

Ailish Veale, TCD, ‘Missionary bodies as contested sites of obedience and resistance’.

Lunch: 12.30-1.30 

1.30-3.00: Session III: Maternal bodies

Chair: Dr Lindsey Earner-Bryne, UCD.

Caitriona Clear, NUIG, ‘Breastfeeding in twentieth-century Ireland’.

Leanne McCormick, UU, ‘No sense of wrongdoing: abortion in Belfast, 1917-67’.

Mary Bridgeman, TCD, ‘Everything about her screamed breakable.”: Parturition, the maternal body, and maternal subjectivity in Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga’.

3.00-3.30: Coffee Break.

3.30- 5.30: Session IV: Mental health and somatization.

Chair: Dr Laurence M. Geary, UCC.

Brendan Kelly, UCD, ‘Men without women, women without men: shock, shell-shock and the Richmond Asylum, Dublin, 1916-19’.

Oonagh Walsh, GCU, ‘Nature and nurture: the Great Famine and epigenetic change in Ireland’.

Gavin Miller, U. Glasgow, ‘Distress, the body, and somatization: lessons from global mental health’.

6.00-7.00 Keynote: Professor Scott Podolsky, Harvard University, ‘From Metchnikoff to the Microbiome: Probiotics, Antibiotics, and Selfhood’.

Chair: Dr Ciara Breathnach, UL.

7.00- 8.00: Reception and launch of the Irish Scottish Medical Humanities Research Alliance.

Saturday 14 March

9.00-10.30: Session V: Maternal/Infant/child bodies: historical perspectives. 

Chair: Ailish Veale, TCD.

Peter Cherry, TCD, and María Cruz de Carlos Varona, Prado Museum, ‘Female clay-eaters in early-modern Spain’.

Georgina Laragy, QUB, ‘Infectors’ and ‘infecteds’: children’s bodies under the 1908 Children Act’.

Olwen Purdue, QUB, ‘Protecting the young: children, poverty and the poor law in inter-war Belfast’.

10.30-11.00: Coffee break

11.00-12.30: Session IV: Body shocks

Chair: Dr Gavin Miller.

Luna Dolezal, U. Durham, ‘Phenomenology, shame and gender in cosmetic surgery’.

Barry Lyons, TCD, ‘“God made a mistake”: children, gender dysphoria and medicine’.

Ivan Perry, UCC, ‘Obesity, public health and the limits of modernity’.

Lunch: 12.30-1.30

1.30-2.30: Session VII Keynote: Professor Patricia Skinner, University of Winchester,‘Gendering the Damaged Body’.

Chair: Dr Catherine Lawless, TCD.

2.30- 4.00 Session VIII: Power, clinical and therapeutic spaces.

Chair: Dr Charlotte Blease, UCD.

Sinead Murnane, MU, ‘Power and Subjectivity in evidence-based practice’.

Hilary Moss, TCD, ‘Aesthetic deprivation in hospital: music, noise pollution and the need for space’.

Elizabeth Fehsenfeld, Drew U, ‘The role of power in changing medical school curriculum’.

4.15-5.15: Roundtable: Medical Humanities, inter-disciplinarity and pathways to progress?

Chair: Dr Ciara Breathnach.

Muiris Houston, Ivan Perry, Susan Mullaney, Gavin Miller and Oonagh Walsh.

Symposium Close