This one day conference is the brainchild of Dr Sam Guglani, a clinical oncologist who specialises in the treatment of patients with breast, lung and brain cancers. You might think this would be enough to keep him busy, but working with people at such a vulnerable and formative time in their lives has clearly left him wondering how to best understand and encapsulate all the things his patients have taught him and that so rarely appear in medical textbooks and research papers. more…

Coming up soon, the organisers of this conference, ‘Thinking about Health’, promise a different kind of conference: small, participative, interdisciplinary, and aimed at users, professionals and academics. It will explore the changing nature of roles and relationships in the NHS and their implications, focussing on the implications of change for the integrity and identity of individuals, professions and organisations.

The conference aims to address questions like does integrity mean anything in the contemporary NHS; is the nature of integrity, individual and corporate, changing; and how can integrity be exemplified and encouraged by policy makers, professionals and users?

Alongside plenary presentations, there will be structured, small group discussions and short contributions by practitioners and users to ensure discussion is earthed in the everyday life of the NHS. A final plenary will draw together the issues discussed, with a panel of leaders from academic disciplines and health care professions.

This is the third event organised by Think About Health. For more about the network see www.thinkabouthealth.org

To join Think About Health or to learn more about the conference contact J Calinas: jcalinas@thinkabouthealth.org

So here’s the thing. No matter how interesting (or otherwise) medical school deans and research grant making bodies  find the work done by medical humanities scholars and educators, the bottom line is (almost) always, what’s in it for patients? How will teaching students using art and literature make them better doctors; how will the insights offered by historians, anthropologists, philosophers etc help ensure that patients get better, more affordable, more appropriate care? Why, in other words, given all the other calls on my time and resources, should I support you and your work rather than focussing on biomedical research? more…

If you’re in the London region you might be interested in this symposium on medicine and the humanities. Focussing on literature, art and music it features some excellent speakers. In keeping with other RSM events, lively debate is sure to follow.

http://www.rsm.ac.uk/academ/hsg106.php

Venue: The Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London, W1G 0AE

Speakers to include: Stephen Golding, Aileen Adams, Richard Hull and Anne Hargreaves.

We live in a society obsessed with the body: the body perfect; the body far from perfect; the body as commodity- modified, objectified, sold on to the highest bidder; the body as art and as the inspiration for art; the body as a source of identity; and the disrupted or diseased body as the object of societal taboo and medical attention. Yet few of us pause in our daily work to try to understand the central role our bodies, and our patients’ bodies, play in the lives we lead. Until of course something goes wrong.

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I want to bring your attention to this one day symposium on the use of the arts in medical training. The setting for the symposium- the Barts and London- is an inspiration in itself. The format for the day invites the delegates to draw on and share their own experiences and ideas as well as to hear from invited speakers. 

Further information and booking details are available at

http://www.performingmedicine.com/om/season.htm

Medical Humanities

Organised by their student section, this evening will undoubtedly prove one of the highlights of the RSM’s busy programme of events. Publicity material for the meeting promises an opportunity to “explore emotion and communication in a medical setting through theatre”. This enticing and still relatively novel approach to medical educational meetings will hopefully attract both the converts and the curious to what looks likely to be a provocative and lively evening. 

With Nell Dunn, the play’s author, Trevor Walker, the play’s director, TV and news presenter Anna Ford and Jed Mercuio, doctor turned author and screenwriter of TV series ‘Bodies’ taking part in a panel discussion after the staging of two ‘Cancer Tales’, this evening is surely a must for anyone within traveling distance interested in finding out what incorporating the arts and humanities into medical education means in action. more…

Jointly organised by the Centre for the History of Medicine at University of Glasgow and the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, Glasgow (a research collaboration between Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Strathclyde), this conference should be of interest to all medical humanities scholars.

http://www.sshm.org/confs.html

The focus of the conference is an engagement with historical perspectives on how health has been defined, by whom, and- importantly- the motivations and objectives informing these choices of frame. An important aim of the conference is to “engage with and critique ‘governmentality’ as a tool of analysis in the history of medicine.” The idea of medicine as an instrument of social control is of course familiar to social historians of medicine, and, as evidenced by conferences like this, continues to be both provocative and informative. By contrast, most doctors are likely to have never, at least knowingly, encountered this way of thinking about the nature and purpose of medicine. more…

Another fantastic conference, this time for bioethicists and for the wider medical humanities community. And an open invitation to speakers and delegates at this and other medical humanities conferences and meetings:send us your papers so that your hard work can be shared with a wider audience.

To submit your paper via our electronic submission system just visit our home page. 

mh.bmj.com

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For anyone interested in the medical humanities I highly recommend this conference. Entitled “Creative space: arts, humanities and healthcare”, the conference themes include visual arts and medicine; literature and medicine; art, architecture, and design in healthcare; and medical humanities in undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. more…