CALL FOR PAPERS AND WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT 

ILLNESS, NARRATIVE, AND PHENOMENOLOGY 

Tuesday 9 July 2013

Faculty of Arts & Institute for Advanced Studies

University of Bristol

Keynote speaker: Prof Brian Hurwitz (King’s College London)

This one-day workshop will inaugurate the Medical Humanities research cluster at the University of Bristol. We welcome papers on any area of illness narrative, phenomenology of illness, narrative medicine, and phenomenology of health from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including (but not restricted to) literature, philosophy, medicine, psychology, arts & health, death studies, medical anthropology, health research, and medical education. We welcome submissions from practitioners and researchers in any domain of health research and practice.

Please send a 400-word abstract by June 17, 2013 to both organizers:

Dr Havi Carel (Philosophy) – havi.carel@bristol.ac.uk

Dr Ulrika Maude (English) – ulrika.maude@bristol.ac.uk.

Decisions will be announced by 20th June, 2013.

The workshop is free and all are welcome. To register please email the organizers.

Workshop venue:

Verdon-Smith Room

Institute for Advanced Studies

Royal Fort House

University of Bristol

Bristol BS8 1UJ

We thank the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Arts and Institute for Advanced Studies for supporting the workshop.

Having had the privilege to meet with Professor Swartz, I read his most recent book publication, ‘Able-Bodied – Scenes from a curious life’ with the jovial sounds of his uncanny ability to reflect on human nature and experiences in the background.

I certainly found Professor Swartz’ presence evident in the somewhat apologetic way he introduces and describes his family, as if telling a story and telling a secret amount to a similar thing. Yet, his words behold a compassion and gentleness that even the greatest of sentiments often fail to display.

Professor Swartz’ conveyed his story as symbol; holding up a mirror to his journey as an academic specializing and devoting himself to studying the way disability manifests in our society and the unfolding of a normative challenge to bring insight into the way we construct our perceptions. For example, at one point, Professor Swartz reminds us that the ‘moralistic ideas’ that ‘go along with our expectations about what people’s appropriate social roles are’ are founding stones for the ideas we cast amid and towards those whom we may perceive as different – we can become in-different as a consequence.

The book welcomes us into exploring the relationship between Professor Swartz and his father; his father whom appears as a man with a great identity – strong and defined, perhaps a form of identity we may find an aspiration for especially in the context of our medicalized body in contemporary clinical settings.

The father’s character develops rather mysteriously and invites much curiousity. We observe the father in the way Professor Swartz cast his young childhood impressions and later in the maturity of a man who comes to realize that the world – or rather, society – sets up certain parameters and boundaries that make up our differences.

However, Professor Swartz’ book and writing is a unique gem because of the way he explores the intricacies of his family life; including the manifestations of the bodies of his aunts and sister and grandmother. He leaves no description untouched and he carefully relativizes differences by emphasizing the power of who we are –who we individually are and that it is our individuality that counts for the establishment of the preciousness of human relationships.

Through this careful approach, Professor Swartz also commits one of the greatest ethical miracles we could hope for in our difficult and turbulent times of battling prejudices and fighting against the tendency to think of the body as a uniform entity that we can stack up and compare against in the empirical apparatus of modern medicine; namely, he shows us how to perceive the story of those around us.

To have witnessed the story of Professor Swartz is an encounter that will certainly shape our minds and practice as we continually come to realize the meanings that different bodies and different abilities have for us all.

About the Author: Leslie Swartz is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Email: lswartz@sun.ac.za 

‘Able-Bodied: Scenes from a curious life’ (2010) is published by Zebra Press: www.zebrapress.co.za

5^th-7^th July 2013

Brighton and Sussex Medical School

Brighton and Sussex Medical School in collaboration with Brighton and Sussex University Hospital Trust and Graphic Medicine invites papers for the fourth international conference on Comics and Medicine. Previous meetings have been held in London, Chicago and Toronto (more information atwww.graphicmedicine.org).

This interdisciplinary conference intends to appeal to a wide audience, including healthcare professionals, comics creators, students, academic scholars, comics enthusiasts, and various stakeholder groups. The meeting will consist of a mix of peer reviewed academic papers, lectures and workshops. There will also be an exhibition and stalls for participants’ work.

We invite proposals for scholarly papers (15-20 minutes) or panel discussions (60 minutes) focusing on medicine and comics in any form (e.g. graphic novels, comic strips, graphic pathographies, bande dessinées, manga, and/or web comics). The theme of this year’s conference means we are interested in work with an ethical flavour. In particular, we seek presentations on:

• Ethics under cover (i.e. how ethical issues are tackled under the surface of graphic works)

• Illness narrative and the comic form

• Balancing humour and respect in comics about illness and disability

• Comics as resistance to the biomedical mainstream

• Comics as a way of seeing and representing illness and the role of healthcare professionals

• Comics in practitioner research and as a method of reflection

• Comics in cross-disciplinary education as both subject and tool

• Comics in literature, medicine and the bioethics classroom

• Comics within different healthcare systems

• European and international perspectives on graphic medicine and the scope for cross cultural analysis

We also welcome workshops (120 minutes). These are intended to be “hands-on” interactive workshops for participants who wish to obtain particular skills with regard to comics and medicine. Suggested subjects for workshops are:

• Creating comics

• Understanding, reviewing and critiquing comics

• Getting comics published

• Teaching and learning with comics

Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by 15th March 2013. While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice of presentation format, we will attempt to honour people’s preferences, and we will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals submitted.

Please note: Presenters are responsible for session expenses (e.g. handouts) and personal expenses (travel, hotel, and meeting registration fees). All presenters must register for the conference (maximum registration fee will be £70 or approximately US $115).

The Hippocrates Initiative began in 2009 as the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine for an unpublished poem on a medical subject. The Hippocrates Initiative now also includes an annual international symposia at which the Hippocrates awards are presented, an international research forum for poetry and medicine and The Hippocrates Press.

With a 1st prize of £5,000 both for the winning poem in the Open International category and for the NHS category, the Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. The deadline for the 2013 awards is midnight GMT 31st January 2013.

See weblink below for news of the 2013 awards including how to submit online:

 http://hippocrates-poetry.org/

“The persevering surgeon” an 18^th century cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson shows a surgeon leering over a dead female body, a sneering smile on his face and her breasts in his fascinated grope. Although this makes uncomfortable viewing, a fascination with the details of human anatomy is something visitors can relate to, as they walk through the Museum of London’s exhibition ‘Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men’.  Intricate sketches, eerie wax models, butterfly wing-thin cross sections of bone and tissue decorate the space, as the creators of the exhibition play up to their visitors’ morbid curiosity.

The exhibition offers more, however, than self-conscious titillation. A serious and intelligent ethical debate is also unassumingly explored, centring around the Anatomy Act of 1832, which automatically committed the body of anyone with the misfortune to have ‘died friendless’ to the use of surgeons.

Not only should the ethical debate about what happened in the past be of interest to anyone involved in medicine now, but it retains huge relevance at a time when only 30% of people in this country are willing to give freely of their body parts after death, as evidenced by their registering as organ donors. The exhibition’s historically interesting re-examination of the role of class politics in shaping the Anatomy Act might well be timely as we consider the origins of the harvesting of bodies overseas for art and the growing illegal organ trade.

It would be too easy, coming from a secular perspective, to portray those who continue to resist the concept of mandatory organ donation after death as superstitious and selfish, but the exhibition is culturally sensitive and provides powerful insights into alternative cultural perspectives.

I found myself unexpectedly disturbed on discovering that souvenirs were kept from stolen or dissected bodies. These little pieces of tissue, kept as trophies, evidence the power their possessor held over the body of another.  Two such ‘souvenirs’ – pages of skin with drawings of crosses and writings on them – were cut from the hanging bodies of two executed Burkers, who murdered a young boy, by members of the vengeful public, and offer a chilling insight into the primal significance of the dead body.

‘Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men’ is open until 14^th April 2013 and is accompanied by a variety of lectures and courses. The museum website includes a ‘virtual study zone’ with films, links and apps.

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/London-Wall/Whats-on/Exhibitions-Displays/Doctors-Dissection-Resurrection-Men/Virtual-Study-Zone.htm

The Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London invites you to a series of events to investigate the relationship between ‘Irishness,’ vision and medicine in modern Irish art and literature.

Join us on Monday 3rd December 2012 at The Royal College of Ophthalmologists for a tour of their collection of antique ophthalmological instruments and a Private View of an original art installation by contemporary Irish artist Sheelagh Broderick.

On 4th December at King’s College London there will be presentations and a panel discussion about William Wilde, James Joyce and William Orpen, followed by a keynote address by leading historian of Irish medicine, Professor Catherine Cox, from University College Dublin.

For further details of the programme, please see: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/chh/events/Irish-Eyes.aspx

Organisers: Keren Hammerschlag, David Stone, Maria Vaccarella

Cost: £5

Registration: http://estore.kcl.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=123&deptid=18&catid=36

Frankenweenie was originally created as a short film and you can sort of tell.  The storyline is simplistic, doesn’t really go anywhere, and offers little in the way of plot.  And yet the sophisticated content of the movie means that I’m inclined to judge this ostensibly child-orientated story against an adult standard.  Indeed, from an adult perspective, the weakness of the storyline honestly doesn’t matter.

Far more important, and appealing, are the layers of charming attention to quirky detail that fans have come to expect of Tim Burton.  Take, for example, the intricate systems of pulleys and levers, that are integral to the practical telling of this story. Cutesy in their ambition, brilliant in their resourcefulness and intricacy. Not to mention the whole host of unsettlingly recognisable, classic characters, that are guaranteed to leave audiences hungry for more. 

The film opens with ten year-old Victor and his little family – mother, father, and Sparky the dog – watching a home movie starring Sparky as ‘The Sparkysaurus’ (the first of many, pleasing tongue-in-cheek references to old horror movies). When the film gets caught in the projector and starts to burn, Victor says he ‘can fix that’ and retreats to his attic lair where he sets about his task with skill and enthusiasm. Because as we’re about to learn, Victor has quite the knack for fixing things.

But Victor is not the stereotypical creative recluse; he is self-contained, but also gentle and patient, and it’s impossible not to warm to him. At one point we see him giving his all at a baseball game, trying desperately to focus away from his real interest, the great science project competition, in an attempt to soothe the worries of his unnecessarily concerned father. And it is here, as throughout the film, that the genius of Burton and his puppeteers shines through, with the endearingly jerky movements of mutt and master drawing us in, so that we, like Victor’s father, want everything to be alright in the end.

So much so that when Sparky meets an untimely end, a perceptible shudder penetrates the warm, glowy place that Burton has so artfully constructed for his audience.  And this is where, perhaps, the medical interest begins, because, using snippets from a school science lesson, and in true heroic doctor style, Victor manages to bring Sparky back to life.

The most obvious issues of relevance to medical readers are, arguably, bereavement and death, and I particularly enjoyed Frankenweenie’s nuanced portrayal of both. But, of course, as with every Frankenstein-inspired movie, there is a central paradox: that whilst scientific advances that help prolong life are, on the whole, welcomed by society, attempts to reverse death are generally not.  ‘It’s easy to promise the impossible’, reflects Victor’s father.

Burton’s film suggests that whether science’s ends are desirable, or not, is not determined by the creepiness or mystery of the methods, but rather, by the motivations and attitudes of those involved.  With a nod to the frustration of some scientists, with the tendency of both the public, and policymakers, to overly simplistic conceptions of the natural and the monstrous, Burton leaves it to Victor’s enigmatic science teacher to claim that people ‘like what science gives’ ‘but not the questions it asks’.

And it is in the end, Burton’s inspired exploration of these complex questions, paired with Frankenweenie’s old-fashioned, fairy-tale, almost tangible simplicity, that make this film well worth a medical humanities viewing.

Frankenweenie goes on general release today.

I will remember the face of the man who I had not expected to see.

In suburban Johannesburg, the soil begins to turn into a rich gold color. The soil summons an enticing depth to the earth, where as Jean-Luc Nancy (1994) writes, we find existence as the cradle between our birth and our death. From our footsteps, the ancestors rise and embody the agency of new life. There is life upon death, upon death.

And this life has a heart that is vivid; a pulsation that is energising; a sound that is lulling. The suffering grows within each person as if the heart is enlarging so not to feign life; a suffering that bleeds the brightest red to signify the liveliest dance.

In Medicine; in the clinical encounter, a patient’s environment is essen(ce)-tial – where the horizon is neutral, where can we see unto, to see beyond and before the narratives of the breaths of our birth; where the spirit is sterilised, where can pain (e)rupture; where the doctor is a strange(r), where is the safety to reveal our shadows; where the walls confine death, where may we be free?

When does a patient become a patient?

At that time, I was the face of the Other. Yet, the face of the man carried an ascription that I could translate. I saw him as a ghost. I saw in his eyes where his story was carved. I saw his story as a skeleton. I saw the words fall from his shoulders, cloaking his body as it bent forwards, towards the ground, but remaining upright to carry his burdens.

I knew he had walked far. I knew the face of the man had seen the sun rise for the first time in a distant land; a land that in his fleeing, he no longer knew.

Are patients always the Other?

The face of the man did not see mine. We shared no moments. But he gave me the moments he had travelled with; the moments that he could not find a place to lose. These moments did not follow him; these moments did not haunt his dreams; these moments did not reflect into him from new moments. Instead, these moments embodied him. They were the death that he had not yet fallen into.

The face of the man was trying to become a-part from his world. His face is the narrative that Rita Charon (2008) describes as the ‘thread of the situation’, which we can reach through tracing the biological, familial, cultural, and existential stories of our struggles. If we do so, then we can engage with compassion; we can help to find our being-in-the-world once again.

* The face of the man belonged to a young Zimbabwean refugee who had walked hundreds of miles alone, crossing the border into South Africa.

References:

1. Jean-Luc Nancy, (1994), ‘The Birth to Presence’, Stanford University Press.

2. Peter L. Rudnytsky and Rita Charon (2008), ‘Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine’, SUNY Press.