CfP: Symposium on the doctor-patient relationship
Doctor-doctor: Global and historical perspectives on the doctor-patient relationship
An interdisciplinary symposium, 24 March 2017, University of Oxford
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 sick, think we 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 doctorpatient17@torch.ox.
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.