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L'àmbit de les Humanitats Mèdiques estableix vincles entre allò que C. P. Snow va anomenar “les dues cultures” (1961): les ciències, d’una banda, i les humanitats i les arts, d’altra banda. Aquests intercanvis i contactes entre disciplines no sols han contribuït —i encara ho fan— que els i les professionals de la medicina siguin més empàtics i comunicatius, sinó que també els ha ajudat a comprendre l’experiència d’emmalaltir amb les veus dels i les pacients, sovint mitjançant poesies, autobiografies, narratives i textos visuals signats per artistes i escritor/es que estan (o han estat) vivint una malaltia. Per tant, podem dir que en el seu origen les Humanitats Mèdiques s’orientaven bàsicament a fer que els metges i les metgesses fossin millors i més humans, el que redundà, inevitablement, en una instrumentalització de les humanitats al servei de les ciències biomèdiques. Aquest objectiu —si bé noble i necessari— encara no s’ha assolit del tot. Efectivament, podem afirmar que la ...

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis, with its obsession with protective gloves and disinfectant liquids, has put into stark relief that contagion – as Sria Chatterjee has recently reminded – shares etymology with contact and is all about touch (Latin:  con : together;  tangere : to touch). The ability or inability to touch and be touched at the time of the pandemic (un)marks the boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies, transforming relations between them. “The distribution of the sensible” (Rancière) becomes literal and produces new environments and forms of being together which are dependent not only on who/what touches and is touched but also on our current understandings of contact. In this context, contagion is not only about viruses infecting bodies but rather becomes a pointer to the dynamic of flourishing and spreading diverse and multiple relations across the biological, the cultural and the technological. Thus, it enables us to see how touch and contact plastically ...

22-23  June 2023,  Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease.  Durham University.   From spillover diseases to re-emerging infections to rising rates of antimicrobial resistance, stories of unruly microbes have proliferated daily conversation in recent years. These serious and continuing threats to human and nonhuman health fly in the face of triumphalist narratives of epidemiological transition and global disease eradication (Bellamy Foster et al., 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the extent to which these human-microbial interactions are mediated by ecological change widely construed, from urban and rural land use change driven by global commerce patterns to shifts in internal microbial populations within bodies. While scholars have developed many frames through which to think about the embeddedness of disease in ecological change historically and in the present, these stories remain on the margins of more traditional biomedical studies, and are often ...

Some of you might be interested in a PhD opportunity available through the University of Portsmouth, working with the National Railway Museum: 'Give him sympathy and a helping hand': Understanding the impact of occupational accidents and disability on English and Welsh railway staff and their families in England and Wales, 1897-1939' The project will be supervised by me, Karen Baker (Library Manager, National Railway Museum) and Cathryn Pearce (University of Portsmouth). It offers a fees-waiver (at UK rates), and can be undertaken full- or part-time. There's a huge amount of potential for the project within the broad parameters set out in the advert (available via the link below). We're keen to see the successful applicant shaping the project focus and making it their own. This is an under-researched area, so the contribution the research makes will be large. Working with the NRM is also brilliant, as there are huge amounts of expertise and materials you'll have...

Galen’s Simples and Therapeutics in the Early Modern Period. Theories, Traditions, and Transformations 1400-1750   Edited by:  Fabrizio Bigotti & John Wilkins   Series:  Palgrave Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine – Springer Nature   Expected release:  2024 .   Contributions are invited from scholars working on any aspect of early modern medicine dealing with the theories, uses, consumption, marketing, and visualisation techniques of simples in the period 1600-1750. The editors particularly welcome contributions on the embodiment of classical therapeutics in a variety of disciplines such, alchemy and 'chymistry', including corpuscular approaches to the question of the properties of drugs and foods. Equally welcome are contributions on the transformation of Galen's rationale across the Mediterranean and beyond, as derived from local adaptations, informal knowledge (e.g. magic and domestic medicine) and commercialisation. The volume would ...

Short Years, Long Years, and Round Years: Anniversaries in the History of Science The organizers invite papers on any aspect of the history of science, technology or medicine and particularly welcome papers engaging with the issue of anniversaries, broadly defined. Historians can be ambivalent about anniversaries. On one hand, they offer an opportunity to reassess and mobilize interest in topics that otherwise would not receive widespread attention. Anniversaries are an occasion to reflect on the enduring importance of history to the contemporary world and are frequently used to argue for funding specific projects. On the other hand, not all topics of historical interest have anniversaries; anniversaries may isolate topics from their historical context or facilitate an arbitrary juxtaposition of past and present; and they may foster expectations that the past must be celebrated rather than critically analyzed. Such topics are fundamental to historical inquiry, prompting reflection ...

Over the past centuries, the industrialisation of Western societies gradually impacted nature, and environmental problems increase with globalisation during the last decades. As a consequence, we are now experiencing major crises which are linked with each other: biodiversity is disappearing faster and faster, and global warming is escalating, not only causing unprecedented damage to the Earth, but also unequally and unfairly affecting different parts of the world. In this context, our summer school proposes to bring together an interdisciplinary range of researchers interested in the various implications and interconnections of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. In doing so, its aims is to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on the historical evolutions of these crises, their current realities, and future pathways for socio-ecological transformation. In short: given the current context, how can researchers from natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities address to...

8–9 June 2023, Oslo Metropolitan University. Work is central to human wellbeing, but job quality has received comparatively little attention in economic history and historical wellbeing studies. The inclusion of ‘decent work’ in the Sustainable Development Goals and the recent profusion of present-day job quality metrics provide an opportunity for historical social science to contribute to discussions about the development of job-related wellbeing and the determinants of good work. The Work and Wellbeing in History FRESH Meeting will bring together research on labor and quality of life in the past. The meeting will welcome economic and social historians, work researchers, and wellbeing scholars to share papers on work in the past, historical wellbeing, and the relationship between the two. We are delighted to welcome  Professor Leandro Prados de la Escosura  (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and  Professor Amy Erickson  (University of Cambridge), who are world-l...

We invite authors to submit abstracts (up to 500 words) prepared for blind review for a conference entitled “Big Data and the History and Philosophy of Science” which will be held on May 18th-19th, 2023 at the University of Toronto. Please see below for the full conference abstract.          Keynote Speakers     Pieter Francois (University of Oxford)    Rachel Spicer (London School of Economics)    Charles Pence (UC Louvain)     Philosophers and historians of science have long been wary about the uses of individual case studies to evaluate philosophical claims about science. The possibilities of cherry-picking or shoehorning in preconceived assumptions about scientific practice into carefully selected examples have led to serious concerns about the prospects of fruitful ways of testing general claims about the process of scientific change. The aim of the conference is to bring together an...

Workshop "Spacetime: Emergence and Mereology" Amphitheatre FCiências.ID, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon 30 / 05 / 2023 If a non-spatiotemporal structure underlies space- time and the latter emerges from the former, then spacetime is not a fun- damental entity. Leaning on this, it has been defended that fundamental physical objects cannot be spatiotemporal (see, e.g.,  Wüthrich (2019) ). How should the building relationship between fundamental physical ontology and spacetime then be understood? According to whether or not composition is adequate to grasp this relationship, some have proposed understanding it in mereological terms (see, e.g.,  Bihan (2018) ), whereas others have advocated alternatives which overcome mereology (see, e.g.,  Baron (2021) ). The work- shop aims to further explore the current metaphysical discussions concerning this relationship by considering different perspectives on the emergence of spacetime and how it relates to fundamental physi...

Venue:  Cambridge (History Faculty). Time : June 5 (9.30AM GMT) – June 6 (1.30PM GMT) 2023 Content: It has become a truism that decolonisation is a process, not a singular event. The formal transition to independence, of colonies becoming states, has been deconstructed to the point of disappearance from the historical lens. At the same time, the political project of decolonising knowledge production has gained traction within the last decade. Fully acknowledging that indeed decolonisation needs to be understood as a process, and that decolonisation of knowledge production is an important and very much on-going project, this workshop proposes that nevertheless the end of formal colonial rule impacted the institutions and epistemologies of knowledge production in a variety of fields, including historiography. John Smail suggested in 1961 “that when there occur great changes in the contemporary scene, there must also be great changes in historiography, that the vision not merely...

August 4, 2023, The National Stereoscopic Association’s 3D-Con The Hyatt Regency Buffalo Hotel, Buffalo, New York July 31-August 7, 2023 The National Stereoscopic Association is pleased to announce its fourth annual "Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography" at the 49 th  3D-Con in Buffalo, New   York. Presentations are welcome on any aspect of stereo-media from the inception of stereoscopic photography to immersive stereo media. We project stereoscopically on the 3D-Con's big screen, and our growing community of international scholars represent diverse research from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. All stereoscopic photography subjects from the historical to the contemporary are invited. Please send an abstract of 500-600 words and a biography of 250-300 words and contact   information. Notification of acceptance by May 29, 2023.  Digital images will be expected by July 5, 2023. Contact Info:  Melody Davis...