History of Medicine meetings & conferences

Altered Consciousness in Relation to Popular Culture

16-17 November 2013 Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom

This meeting will explore the theme of altered consciousness in relation to popular culture, psychology, philosophy, religion, medicine and literature during the period 1918-1980.

Many literary and popular authors and performers during the mid twentieth century represented altered states of consciousness in their work, responding to and participating in research relating to such topics as interplanetary contact, ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, mind-altering drugs, psychic therapies, spiritualisms, shamanism, erotics, conversion, revivals, somnambulism, precognition, distraction, group mind, multiple personality, hypnotism, lucid dreaming, Vedanta, hysteria and automatism.

What was the continuing legacy of nineteenth-century approaches to mind and spirit? How did work at the fringes of psychiatry and psychology intersect with mind sciences that consolidated their authority during the mid-twentieth century? What are the key interactions between European, North American and non-Western sources? How did investigations cross the borders between arts, sciences, religion, education and the military?

This event is generously supported by: the British Society for the History of Science, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Centre for the History of the Emotions, and the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.
 

From Moral Treatment to Psychological Therapies: Histories of Psychotherapeutics from the York Retreat to the Present Day

Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines, University College London, United Kingdom

11-13th October 2013

Whilst the history of psychiatry has become a well developed field of scholarship, there remain few examinations of psychotherapeutic treatments beyond histories of psychoanalytic approaches. This conference will bring together recent historical research on therapeutic treatments for mental distress and disorder, from the 18th century up to the present. It seeks to explore how such therapies were developed, their institutional and intellectual contexts, and the debates and controversies which may surround their use. ‘Psychotherapeutics’ is defined in its broadest terms, and is intended to include approaches that have been accepted by the medical or state establishments, as well as those practiced outside official institutional settings.

34th Anthropology and Health Conference

Anthropology and Personalised Medicine: Impacting the Future of Comprehensive Healthcare

8th-12th September 2013, Inter University Centre, Don Frana Bulića 4, 20 000 Dubrovnik, Croatia

Objectives:

1. To delineate anthropological perspectives on biological constructs of diversity such as “race” and their historical and current impact on the development and practice of personalized medicine.

2. To delineate anthropological sociocultural constructs of diversity such as racism and ethnocentrism, bioethics, health equity and disparities and their historical and current impact on the development and practice of personalized medicine.

3. To examine anthropological contributions to the molecular genetic, population genetic and epigenetic foundations of personalized medicine using Croatian populations as an exemplar.

4. Through the dual lenses of medicine and anthropology discuss new developments and projected epidemiological impact of personalized medicine on metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cancers, forensic sciences, and other diseases and conditions.

5.To develop a comprehensive approach to the dissemination, tracking and assessment of the impact of the conference using the Becker Model.

Classifying Sex: Debating DSM-5

Thursday, 4 July 2013 to Friday, 5 July 2013 Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

This conference brings together social and political scientists, feminist scholars, sexologists, psychiatrists, historians of science, as well as mental health practitioners and sexual rights activists to critically explore the sexual classifications produced by the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in May 2013. The DSM is the standard reference for the classification of mental disorders, and its first major revision since 1994 is consequently an important global event. The conference will explore which categories of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, ‘healthy’ and ‘pathological’ sexualities and identities the new manual produces, and critically scrutinise their consequences for diagnostic practices as well as their wider social and political implications. The conference will take place on 4 and 5 July 2013 at the interdisciplinary Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge. It is financially supported by CRASSH, the Wellcome Trust, the Sexual Divisions Study Group of the British Sociological Association, the French Institute, Northumbria University, the Laboratoire de Sociologie of the University of Lausanne, and The Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES).

Victorian Body Parts

St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum, Clerkenwell, United Kingdom Saturday 14th September 2013

The Victorian Body Parts Conference is an interdisciplinary event for postgraduate and early career researchers, and will be held on Saturday 14th September 2013 at St Bart’s Pathology Museum, Clerkenwell.

It is supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies and the Birkbeck Centre for 19th Century Studies.

The conference is being organised by Beatrice Bazell and Emma Curry, both in their 2nd year of PhD research at Birkbeck, working on representations of body parts in Victorian culture.

Why were the Victorians so interested in atomizing the body? What was causing nineteenth-century bodies to come apart at the seams? From articulated bones to beating hearts, from wooden legs to hair bracelets, from death masks to glass eyes, the Victorian body was chattering with its own discorporation.

The results of this fragmentation are successors to the recent scholarly work on material culture in examining the atomisation of the body as a symptom of being surrounded by the commodities generated by the nineteenth century. From objects under glass domes to pieces of the body in glass cases (authentic specimens of which fill St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum), commodification and dissection have much in common.

This conference thus seeks to explore, develop and enrich perspectives on the numerous and varied ways in which the Victorians approached their anatomy, bringing together postgraduate, early career and established researchers to consider why body parts provided such an urgent and stimulating focus within the nineteenth-century cultural imagination.

Blog:victorianbodyparts.wordpress.com                       

Twitter: @victbodyparts

International Conference on Deep Brain Stimulation - 25 Years

The International Conference on Deep Brain Stimulation - 25 years - will take place in Düsseldorf, Germany, from 30 - 31 May, 2013.

The topics of the scientific program include

1) Basic mechanisms and animal models of DBS

2) Human electrophysiology and imaging

3) Deep Brain Stimulation in

- Movement disorders

- Neuropsychiatric disorders

- Dementia / epilepsy / pain

4) History, visions, ethics

In the past 25 years the development of deep brain stimulation has revolutionized the treatment of Parkinson´s disease and other movement disorders. Although the mechanisms of DBS are still not fully understood the remarkable therapeutic efficacy of DBS in Parkinson´s disease and tremor has prompted clinical and basic research to scrutinize further applications in neurological and psychiatric disorders. At the same time DBS has tremendously fostered research in basal ganglia physiology and pathophysiology.

This conference will provide a unique opportunity to cover and discuss the current state-of-the-art, hot topics, and future directions of DBS in plenary talks, symposia, short oral communications and poster presentations.

International Health Organisations (IHOs) and the History of Health and Medicine c. 1870-2012

October 18-20, 2013 Shanghai, China

A jointly organised conference between the Shanghai Social Sciences Association, the David Musto Centre at Shanghai University, and the CSHHH Glasgow at the University of Strathclyde

IHOs and the history of health and medicine

Recent studies of institutions as varied as the League of Nations Health Committee, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Medical Missionary Society have drawn attention to the multiple roles played by international organisations since the nineteenth-century in the fields of healthcare and medicine. Most obviously they have played important parts in addressing particular health crises and emergencies, by providing medical expertise, drugs and medicines, and more general aid. Longer term impacts, however, have included the establishment of lasting healthcare infrastructures, the dissemination of new ideas about health and medicine, and the emergence of major bodies that transcend national political, economic and professional interests. However, from the refusal of the East India Company to sanction medical missionary activity in the eighteenth-century, to the recent ban on the WHO by al-Shabaab in Somalia, such international organisations have often faced opposition and hostility.

While there are a number of studies of particular institutions and movements, the IHO has rarely been viewed as a distinct phenomenon in the history of health and medicine in the modern period. This conference seeks to address this by bringing together historians and those from related disciplines with relevant research interests. It aims to examine fresh insights into particular periods, organisations and case studies, but also to explore the potential of comparative perspectives, and of teasing IHOs out of the wider history of health and medicine in modernity.

Key questions would include:

What agendas and ideologies shaped the emergence of IHOs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

How far have IHOs met their objectives and what shaped or prevented success?

What impacts have IHOs had in the locales where they have been embedded?

To what extent have locals worked with or against IHOs and what shaped their approaches?

In what ways has the emergence of the IHO had wider impacts on international relations, and on domestic relations in contributing countries and cultures?

What does the emergence of the IHO over the last two centuries tell historians about the history of medicine, and of modernity?

Contacts

Dr Yong-an Zhang
History Department
Shanghai University
99 Shangda Road
Shanghai, 200444, China
www.mcdps.shu.edu.cn
zhangyongan@shu.edu.cn

Professor James Mills
CSHHH Glasgow
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow G11XQ, UK
www.strath.ac.uk/cshhh
jim.mills@strath.ac.uk

Dr. Qi Zhou
Academic Monthly Editorial Office
Shanghai Social Sciences Association
zhouqish@126.com

Society for the Social History of Medicine 2014 Conference

Disease, Health and the State

10-12 July 2014 Oxford, United Kingdom

The Centre for Health, Medicine and Society: Past and Present, Oxford Brookes University and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford

The Society for the Social History of Medicine hosts a major, biennial, international, and interdisciplinary conference. In 2014 it will explore the relationships between health, disease, and the state. Responses to disease and concerns about health contributed to the development of the state, yet disease and medicine have also challenged and disrupted state authority. The biennial conference is not exclusive in terms of its theme, and reflects the broad diversity of the discipline of the social history of medicine.

Conference Organizers: Dr Katherine Watson, Dr Erica Charters

Anti-Portraiture

Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom 6th June 2013

In the disciplines of art history and visual culture, the portrait is often understood as the depiction of a unique human subject. But what are the limits of portraiture? What can a portrait represent other than the visual or essential likeness of an individual or group?

This one-day conference aims to address non-traditional forms of portraiture and self-portraiture, and to explore the potential of the ‘anti-portrait’ for rethinking the boundaries of the genre. For the purposes of the conference we define the anti-portrait in the broadest possible terms as an artwork that simultaneously engages with and resists the conventional codes of portraiture.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Portraits of non-human subject matter: sites, spaces, cities or historical periods

Non-visual portraits: music; sound installation; works which incorporate a tactile or olfactory element

Absence and the anti-portrait: works which evoke non-presence, through the use of traces, fragments or indexical references such as clothing, hair or other fragments

Alternative portrait formats: object-based, sculptural or environmental assemblage

Non-western approaches to portraiture

Illness or injury and the anti-portrait: if serious illness constitutes a challenge to a coherent selfhood, what does that mean for visual representations of the sick subject?

Historical or theoretical approaches to portraiture that trouble the relationship between representation and referent

This conference is supported by Birkbeck School of Arts and the Department of History of Art and Screen Media.

Healthy Living in Pre-Modern Europe. The Theory and Practice of the Six Non-Naturals (c.1400-1700)

Institute of Historical Research, Bloomsbury, London, United Kingdom 13-14 September 2013

This conference seeks to bring together scholars working on topics related to the role played by the six Non-Naturals in health maintenance in the late-medieval and early modern period. It is well-known that health was thought to depend on the regulation of the six key factors affecting body functions: the air one breathes, sleep, food and drink, evacuations, movement and emotions. In pre-modern medicine careful management of these spheres of life was regarded as crucial if one wished to prevent disease.

This conference seeks to bring together scholars working on topics related to the role played by the six Non-Naturals in health maintenance in the late-medieval and early modern period.  It is well-known that health was thought to depend on the regulation of the six key factors affecting body functions: the air one breathes, sleep, food and drink, evacuations, movement and emotions. In pre-modern medicine careful management of these spheres of life was regarded as crucial if one wished to prevent disease. Yet the study of the Non Naturals has been neglected, as scholars have focused on the development of the concept in medical thought rather than on the advice regarding the individual non-naturals. The only exception concerns the recommendations related to food and diet while the other Non-Naturals have been the object only of general surveys. Even less attention has been paid to the relationship between preventive advice and practice.  This conference intends to address these gaps. Moreover we hope to stimulate discussions which will enable us to compare different regions and countries and to explore changing approaches to the Non-Naturals (and to the underpinning humoural principles) over the period under consideration.

More specifically the conference aims to:

• Compare the contents of medical advice about the Non-Naturals (how these activities should ideally be performed) and the actual practices associated with keeping healthy.  What relationship did practices bear to prescription? In order to address these questions scholars might use a range of ‘extra-medical’ sources, such as letters, diaries, literature and imagery.

• Explore change within the body of medical theory on the Non-Naturals. Were definitions of what was regarded as harmful or beneficial to health modified over the period? And is the idea of the body and its vulnerabilities that underpins these views subject to any transformations? It has widely been assumed that humoural theory was essentially static and unchanging during the early modern period. Is this view in need of revision?

• Explore the extent to which both recommendations about healthy living and the preventive measures adopted in everyday life changed over time. And were these transformations medically or socially driven? In other words were they a consequence of shifting ideas about the working of the body or of changing lifestyles?

• Stimulate comparisons between different regions and countries. For example, did the medical traditions in different countries place different emphases on the six Non-Naturals? Did they all conceptualise the humours in similar ways?  Were there different lay approaches to keeping healthy in different national contexts? Did people focus on any particular Non-Naturals –giving more weight to diet, for example, or to taking exercise- in order to maintain their health?