La médecine dans les drames télévisés costumés.

Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Costume Dramas

Call for Papers

Date: 

September 15, 2018

Location: 

Maryland, United States

Subject Fields: 

British History / Studies, Film and Film History, Popular Culture Studies, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, American History / Studies

There has been a long relationship between television and medicine: some of the small screen’s most popular shows, on both sides of the Atlantic, have been medical in focus, from hospital-set dramas like ER to reality TV shows and docudramas like One Born Every Minute. This fascination with doctors, hospitals and bodies is also shared by period drama television, but scholarship has paid little attention to this intersection/relationship. Recent period dramas including The Knick, Mercy Street, and Charite, for example, use the hospital setting familiar from older shows like Bramwell, to address larger themes about the professionalization of medicine, medical innovations and failures, and the gender politics that surround the profession. Dramas like Call the Midwife document the progress of the NHS and female reproductive health while also engaging in contemporary debates about contraception, abortion, and disability. In addition, medical-driven narratives abound in almost every period drama on our screens today: war-induced mental and physical trauma in Peaky Blinders; Spanish ‘flu in The Village; gay conversion plotlines in A Place to Call Home; bodily and facial disfigurement in Home Fires; medical experimentation and monstrosity in Penny Dreadful and Frankenstein Chronicles; nursing as a vehicle of female emancipation in The Crimson Field and Morocco: Love in Times of War; and all of the above and many more in Downton Abbey, whose most famous plotlines are medical in nature. 

This edited collection seeks to address this important area of period drama studies, and we are looking for proposals for essays on any of the above issues, or which may be interdisciplinary in approach and engage with the medical humanities, interrogating relationships between medicine and history, class, gender or race. Our collection aims to be international in scope, so submissions about period dramas from/situated in any country are welcome.

Please send a 500 word abstract and brief biography by Sept 15, 2018 to:

Julie Anne Taddeo: taddeo@umd.edu

James Leggott: james.leggott@northumbria.ac.uk

Katherine Byrne: kbyrne@ulster.ac.uk

Contact Info: 

Dr. Julie Anne Taddeo

Contact Email: 

taddeo@umd.edu

Histoire du handicap

The Oxford Handbook of Disability History

Michael Rembis, Catherine J. Kudlick, Kim Nielsen (Editors)

Series: Oxford Handbooks

Hardcover: 552 pages

Publisher: Oxford University Press (July 18, 2018)

Language: English

ISBN-13: 978-0190234959

Disability history exists outside of the institutions, healers, and treatments it often brings to mind. It is a history where disabled people live not just as patients or cure-seekers, but rather as people living differently in the world--and it is also a history that helps define the fundamental concepts of identity, community, citizenship, and normality. 

The Oxford Handbook of Disability History is the first volume of its kind to represent this history and its global scale, from ancient Greece to British West Africa. The twenty-seven articles, written by thirty experts from across the field, capture the diversity and liveliness of this emerging scholarship. Whether discussing disability in modern Chinese cinema or on the American antebellum stage, this collection provides new and valuable insights into the rich and varied lives of disabled people across time and place.

Diversité et maladie mentale

Diversity and Mental Illness

Call for Papers

Workshop, 24 October

The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford & Phenomenology and Mental Health Network The Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice, St. Catherine’s College Diversity and Mental Illness (one-day workshop) 24th of October 2018, University of Oxford

The workshop is a part of TORCH’s annual headline series Humanities & Identities

Organizers: Marcin Moskalewicz & Bill Fulford

Confirmed speakers:

Michael A. Schwartz (Texas A&M Health Science Center, USA)

Giovanni Stanghellini (Università degli Studi G. d’Annunzio Chieti e Pescara, Italy)

Subject

When speaking of diversity we usually focus on class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability, and forget mental disorders. Is this merely a coincidence, an oversight, or a sign of a deeper stigma? While contemporary cosmopolitan populations value the diversity of class, race, gender, etc., they often disvalue the diversity that is an inevitable consequence of mental syndromes. Our tolerance for radical mental otherness seems quite narrow. Modern mental health care calls for conformity and not for diversity, and it often pathologizes emotional and behavioral plurality of human beings. The goal of this workshop is to explore the question of diversity in mental health care from a transdisciplinary perspective cutting across medical humanities, history and philosophy of psychiatry, and phenomenological psychopathology.

Themes

Is there a stigma in our culture that prevents us from seeing some benefits of mental illness (such as those cherished by the neurodiversity movement)? What are these benefits? How to practice radical inclusivity today? Should we seek a balance within the often conflicting values in mental health care? Or must we rather learn to acknowledge the incompatible and irreducible variety of worldviews? Should the acceptance of a radically different perception of the world – such as a delusional one – be unconditional? What will a person-centered approach to mental disorders gain from assuming the diversity perspective?

Submissions

We invite proposals of 20-30 minutes talks as well as posters. Please submit a 300-500 words abstract of your talk/poster to marcin.moskalewicz@humanities.ox.ac.uk. Deadline: 15th of September 2018. Applicants will be notified shortly afterwards.

Funding

Attendance is free of charge. Refreshments and lunch for the speakers will be provided. Limited funds are available to assist PhD students and Post-Docs with travel expenses. If you are in need of such support, please submit a request together with your abstract.

La mesure de la vie mentale

La mesure de la vie mentale & les Premiers Instruments Emblématiques de la Psychologie de Laboratoire

Exposition

Jusqu’au 29 septembre 2018 au Musée d’Histoire de la Médecine
12 rue de l’École de Médecine - 75006 Paris

- du 27 juin au 13 juillet et du 1er au 29 septembre : du lundi au samedi de 14h à 17h30, sauf le jeudi
- du 16 juillet au 31 août : de 14h à 17h30 du lundi au vendredi (fermé le weekend et le 15 août)

Commissaire d’exposition : Yvan BROHARD, Chargé de mission Art & Science de l’Université Paris Descartes

L'esprit de cette exposition est de présenter au public quelques anciens instruments de la psychologie parmi les plus emblématiques et les plus curieux que l'Université Paris Descartes possède dans les riches collections de l'Institut de psychologie et du Musée d'histoire de la médecine. On pourra y admirer certains appareils construits par les firmes allemandes et françaises de la fin du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe siècle, dont il n'existe souvent plus aucun exemplaire connu dans le monde mais que le visiteur pourra ici contempler à loisir. Cette exposition s'inscrit résolument dans une politique de valorisation scientifique du patrimoine instrumental de l'Université Paris Descartes et ancre la psychologie française actuelle dans un passé glorieux.

Serge NICOLAS
Professeur de psychologie expérimentale et d'histoire de la psychologie à l'Université Paris Descartes
Membre senior de l'Institut Universitaire de France.

Les corps albinos

Different Shades of White: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Albinotic Body

Conference

6 - 8 September 2018 at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany

Albinism made international headlines in recent years, from the terrible atrocities inflicted on persons with albinism in Eastern Africa to the emergence of fashion models with albinism around the world. It is much more than a medical phenomenon. At the conference, participants present papers that discuss albinism in historical, social, aesthetic and/or political perspective. We are interested in the varying perception, performance, representation, framing and treatment of albinism across different times and in several locales. How does the presentation of albinism differ in medicine, art photography, fictional literature or in the humanities and social sciences? The conference brings together experts from inside and outside academia to foster dialog and exchange about practical, political, artistic and scholarly perspectives.

Keynote lectures by

Ikponwosa Ero, United Nations Independent Expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism

Charlotte Baker, Lancaster University

For registration, please write to albinism@uni-mainz.de

Please see the full programme available online for more details.

Contact Info: 

Conveners of the conference are the members of the research project "Un/doing Albinism: Recodings of a bodily difference through historically shifting frames" at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings coordinates the project; Kathrin Hoff and Christopher Hohl are research assistants. The project is itself a subproject of a larger multidisciplinary DFG Research Group "Un/doing Differences. Practices in Human Differentiation," established in 2013.

Contact Email: 

albinism@uni-mainz.de

URL: 

http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/eng/3203.php

René Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes

Un médecin baron d'Empire, René Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes

Henri Ducoulombier

Éditeur : Henri Ducoulombier

Prix de vente au public (TTC) : 20 €

642 pages ; 23 x 15 cm ; broché

ISBN 9781983364808

Résumé : Avec Percy et Larrey, René Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes est l’une des trois grandes figures de la médecine et de la chirurgie du Premier Empire. Engagé dès 1793 dans les armées de la Révolution, il est médecin en chef à l’hôpital militaire du Val-de-Grâce, membre de l’expédition d’Égypte puis inspecteur général du Service de santé des Armées. Au cours des campagnes de Russie et de Saxe, il est fait prisonnier à Vilna en 1813 et à Torgau en 1814. De l’épopée napoléonienne, il aura connu surtout les hôpitaux et les charniers, les blessés, les malades et les épidémies. Resté dans l’ombre de ses pairs illustres, il lui fallait un historien. Avec ce livre, Henri Ducoulombier signe la première biographie, érudite et complète, d’un personnage majeur et peu connu de l’histoire de la médecine du Premier Empire.

Les récits médicaux de la mauvaise santé

Medical Narratives of Ill Health

Call for Papers

Humanities special issue

The field of literature and medicine has been steadily growing over the past four decades, solidifying itself as a vital component of the medical and health humanities. The intersection of literature and medicine enriches how we view issues of health, disease, and care, particularly in how we value the individual’s narrative of health and ill health to help with diagnosis, treatment, and the relationship between the practitioner and the patient. In an attempt to wade through the difficult terrain of defining disease and health, Kenneth Boyd provides the following medical definitions (adapted from Marshall Marinker’s earlier work): “Disease […] is the pathological process, deviation from a biological norm. Illness is the patient's experience of ill health, sometimes when no disease can be found. Sickness is the role negotiated with society” (Boyd, 1997). What Boyd reveals about these definitions is that one allows for the individual’s experience of ill health (illness), while the other two rely on others’ perceptions of ill health. Thus, he concludes, a clear definition of disease (and even sickness) is elusive: “to call something a disease is a value judgement, relatively unproblematic in cases when it is widely shared, but more contentious when people disagree about it” (Boyd, 1997). This contentious space has widened during the modern medical era (early nineteenth century to the present day), as medical reliance on technology favors an objective identification of disease. However, literary works, through both personal accounts and fictional scenarios, challenge this singular narrative of disease and ill health provided by the medical community.

For this special issue of Humanities, we seek to explore how literature from the early nineteenth century to the present day engages with and challenges modern medical authority when it comes to understanding disease, illness, and sickness. Papers for this special issue of Humanities should focus on narratives—fictional and/or non-fictional (such as medical realism, science fiction, pathographies, medical reports, etc.)—that explore the contentious space of disagreement between medicine, society, and the individual. Authors might consider topics such as: disease as metaphor; social vs. medical definitions of disease; patient agency and individual experiences of illness; challenges to medical technology’s presumed objectivity; representations of contagion and/or public health—or any other topics that relate to better understanding literary representations of disease, illness, and/or sickness.

Articles should be no more than 8000 words, inclusive of notes. The deadline for submission of articles to the guest editor is January 10, 2019: please email articles directly to Amanda M. Caleb at acaleb@misericordia.edu. The deadline for final drafts is February 28, 2019, with expected puplication in early Summer 2019. Please consult the journal's webpage for formatting instructions: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/contagion. 

Dr. Amanda Caleb
Guest Editor

Contact Info: 

Dr. Amanda M. Caleb, Misericordia University

Contact Email: 

acaleb@misericordia.edu

Les performances de la maladie dans la médecine victorienne

Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine 

Meredith Conti



Series: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
Hardcover: 232 pages
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (July 19, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1138703117
ISBN-13: 978-1138703117


Few life occurrences shaped individual and collective identities within Victorian-era society as critically as witnessing or suffering from illness. The prevalence of illness narratives within late nineteenth-century popular culture was made manifest on the period’s British and American stages, where theatrical embodiments of illness were indisputable staples of actors’ repertoires.

Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine reconstructs how actors embodied three of the era’s most provocative illnesses: tuberculosis, drug addiction, and mental illness. In placing performances of illness within wider medicocultural contexts, Meredith Conti analyzes how such depictions confirmed or resisted salient constructions of diseases and the diseased. Conti’s case studies, which range from Eleonora Duse’s portrayal of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier to Henry Irving’s performance of senile dementia in King Lear, help to illuminate the interdependence of medical science and theatre in constructing nineteenth-century illness narratives. Through reconstructing these performances, Conti isolates from the period’s acting practices a lexicon of embodied illness: a flexible set of physical and vocal techniques that performers employed to theatricalize the sick body. In an age when medical science encouraged a gradual decentering of the patient from their own diagnosis and treatment, late nineteenth-century performances of illness symbolically restored the sick to positions of visibility and consequence.