CfP: Doctor, Doctor: Global and Historical Perspectives on the Doctor-Patient Relationship
An interdisciplinary symposium, Friday 24 March 2017, TORCH, University of Oxford
Keynote Speaker: Dr Anna Elsner, University of Zurich
Call for Papers
“Two distinct and separate parties interact with one another – not one mind (the physician’s), not one
body (the patient’s), but two minds and two bodies.”
– Jay Katz, The Silent World
of Doctor and Patient (1984)
The
doctor-patient relationship is the primary way that we experience
medicine: we go to the doctor when we are may be sick, or
are scared of becoming sick. Healthcare is constructed around
encounters between practitioners and patients, and the relationship
between them is integral to how medicine is practised, experienced, and
represented around the world. It may be paternalistic
or a partnership of equals, underpinned by acts of care and compassion
or negligence and abuse.
In
a one-day symposium on Friday 24 March 2017, we will explore the
different ways in which encounters between medical practitioners
and patients have been imagined or conceptualised across different
historical and cultural contexts.
How
has our understanding of these interactions been affected by factors
such as scientific and technological advances, urbanisation,
and increased patient demand? By interrogating these idiosyncratic and
complex personal and professional relationships, how can we better
understand broad themes, such as the professionalisation of medicine or
the politics of identity? The doctor often tells
us a great deal about the patient: but what can the patient tell us
about the doctor?
We
encourage proposals for 20-minute papers from scholars with an interest
in medical humanities working across different disciplines,
e.g. arts, humanities, social sciences, and medicine. While papers on
the history of medicine in British and North American contexts are
welcome, we would also like to hear from scholars working in languages
other than English, and on areas of the world beyond
Britain and North America.
Possible topics could include, but are not limited to:
- Representations of practitioners and patients in literature, visual arts, and film;
- Different types of medical practitioners, e.g. nurses, dentists, midwives;
- History of emotions: the affect of the medical encounter;
- Whose voice? Patient narratives and case histories;
- Living with diseases of the age: nervous attacks, melancholia, hysteria, shell-shock;
- Doctors, patients and identity politics: gender, sexuality, race, class;
- Professionalisation, power and authority;
- Experiencing and/or practising colonial, imperial, and indigenous medicine;
- Medical encounters in the institution: hospitals, workhouses, prisons, asylums;
- Psychiatry and mental health;
- Medicine, the state, and its citizens;
- The material culture surrounding doctor-patient relationships.
Proposals should be no more than 300 words in length and a short biography should be included in addition. Please submit them
to Sarah Jones (Oriel College, Oxford) and Alison Moulds (St Anne's, Oxford) doctorpatient17@torch.
This one-day symposium is funded by The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) through a Medical
Humanities Programme Grant and the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Constructing
Scientific Communities.
@doctorpatient17