Since Hippocrates in early 5 B.C., Medicine has carried an ‘angel on its shoulder’; a reflexive gaze on the skill, and phenomenologies of healing between the doctor and his patient. Ethics is a code, a practice, and a guide amid the terrain of the hands that tend to the body using instruments of medicine’s enterprise. Referring to the Oath:

‘I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts’.

Daniel Sokol, Honorary Senior Lecturer at Imperial College, London and recently qualified barrister, undertook the challenge of fitting ‘ethics’ into our contemporary medical practice; whereby Medicine is confronted by a body unprecedented in relation to the ways in which we can perceive, examine, intervene, create, and prolong the existence of our bodies; our lives.

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Plans for the 8th annual conference of the Association for Medical Humanities are now well underway, with an exciting line up of papers, workshops and plenary speakers. Celebrated poet and doctor Dannie Abse will be running a session entitled Poet in a White Coat; Jed Mercurio, author of Bodies and creator of the TV series Cardiac Arrest, will speak on the Doctor as Antihero;  Professor Laurie Maguire, from Magdalen College Oxford, will explore Shakespeare’s guide to health and illness; and Matthew Alexander from North Carolina, a leading authority on the use of cinema in medical education, will begin the conference with a workshop and plenary address on this subject. more…

I recently attended the 2nd Annual Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Symposium, which was held at Warwick Medical School and hosted by Professor Donald Singer and Associate Professor Michael Hulse. During the day, a group of researchers and clinicians from a variety of backgrounds gathered to explore the role of poetry in the discourse of medicine, including renowned poets, Marilyn Hacker and Gwyneth Lewis.

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Good medicine is more than a set of technical decisions and interventions involving drugs, operations or tests. It demands more of the practitioner – professionalism, empathetic care, moral consideration, insight, an understanding of human suffering and necessarily, wisdom. These attributes are not always prioritised in selecting for or training healthcare professionals, and there is little time or attention given to their authentic development within busy working environments. Further, there is a widening hiatus of trust, understanding and expectation between medicine and society around what constitutes good medicine. This pressingly requires real engagement around medicine’s role and society’s values. A purely scientific answer will never prove sufficient here.

Medicine Unboxed is a unique project and conference programme that engages both the public and front-line NHS staff with a view of medicine that is infused and elaborated by the humanities. Contributors include artists, writers, the clergy, poets, philosophers, lawyers, linguists, musicians, theatre, ethicists, academics and doctors. The results are thought-provoking, inspiring, sometimes funny and often
moving.

Our theme this year is Medicine and Values.

We think of medicine as simply fact-based, efficient and scientifically robust. These arbiters can become the measures of good medicine. However, medicine is infused with judgments of value – individually for doctors and patients but also in medical science, for society, for policy-makers and health economists. Ethics, law and religion inform duties and rights in medicine, through principles and values. The values that define good medicine are not always apparent or agreed upon and there remains the potential for tension between them.

We’d like to invite you to come along to Medicine Unboxed 2011 and join us in uncovering the values that pertain to medical care and debating the ambivalences around the arbiters of good medicine. Our speakers this year include the Rev. John Bell, John Carey, Lionel Shriver, Jo Shapcott, Ray Tallis, Paul Bailey, Michael
Arditti and Havi Carel.

Come to the debate – be inspired.

Sam Guglani, Consultant Clinical Oncologist.

http://medicineunboxed.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=040c885489432f9ea79fbd23b&id=f00835b9f4&e=1767bdcee5

Scholars from the universities of Glamorgan and Cardiff are currently breaking new ground in the Medical Humanities with the Off Sick project, writes Dr Richard Marsden. This research initiative, led by Dr Martin Willis and Dr Keir Waddington, puts a new twist on the well-known concept of the ‘illness narrative’. It focuses not on the people who actually suffer from illness, but instead on those who support and care for them. In this vein the project team is currently gathering stories from carers across the South Wales area. more…