News, events and publications
We host regular extra curricular events – lectures, seminars, films, reading groups, workshops. These are free and open to everyone. We hope we will see you sometime this year at one of them! To register your interest, either as a participant or to suggest events and speakers, please email us at .
If you'd like to hear about the lastest events as they are released, please sign up for our bi-weekly(ish) newsletter here. We mention new items in every newsletter and older items are always available online here until the event or item ends.
HARRIS FELLOWSHIP 2011 application deadline extension
The Medical Humanities Program offers two Harris Fellowships each round annually, owing to the generous establishment of the Harold and Gwenneth Harris Endowment for Medical Humanities.
The deadline for 2011 Round 2 applications (normally the 31st of October) has been extended to the 14th of November.
Please contact the Program co-ordinator, , for further information.
Upcoming events
Monday, 7 November - Dr Ross Jones on Humanity's Mirror: 150 Years of Anatomy in Melbourne as part of the History of Medicine Library Lecture Series.
All lectures are held on Monday at 6.30pm at the RACP Education Centre, Level 8, 52 Phillip Street, Sydney.
Contact the Librarian on (02) 9256 5413 or racplib@racp.edu.au for further information and bookings. Entry, which includes refreshments, is $10 at the door.
Tuesday, 15 November - Governing Conduct in the Age of the Brain - Professor Nikolas Rose.
Co-sponsored by Sydney Ideas, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Biopolitics of Science Research Network and The Australian Sociological Association.
6.00pm - 7.30pm, in the Law School Foyer, the University of Sydney
Contact Professor Catherine Waldby at +61 2 9036 7206 or email.
For more information see Sydney Ideas.
Sunday, 20 November - Q Station Lecture Series: two presentations
Mercury in Medicine: Poison or Panacea?, Charles George
Australia’s Koala – Icon or Menace?, Paul Canfield.
2.00pm – 4.00pm, Q Station, at North Head Scenic Drive, Manly.
Entry is free, but reservations are essential. For bookings, phone 9466 1500.
Creative Doctors' Network
A regular meeting of doctors who are interested in the arts and creativity is held at the AMA House, 69 Christie Street, St Leonards. Dr Tony Chu established the group in 2007, and the group has steadily grown since then.
The 2012 schedule of events will be made available later this year.
You don't have to be an AMA Member to be part of the group, any medical practitioner and medical student can join the database - email for information.
Royal Australian College of Physicians Library
The RACP library hosts a regular series of historical talks and other events, upcoming events can be found on their website. The next talk will be on November 7 when Dr Ross Jones presents on Humanity's Mirror: 150 Years of Anatomy in Melbourne. All lectures are held on Monday at 6.30pm at the RACP Education Centre, Level 8, 52 Phillip Street, Sydney.
Contact the Librarian on (02) 9256 5413 or racplib@racp.edu.au for further information and bookings. Entry is $10 at the door including refreshments.
Sydney Medical School 2011 Seminar Series
Sydney Medical School present their 2011 Seminar Series, Controversies and Leadership in Health Seminars. These 90 minute Seminars are open to all and are held in the Footbridge Theatre. (PDF here.) They are on controversial topics with outstanding speakers who have a strong record of leadership. Upcoming seminars include:
- The Campbelltown Hospital Crisis – an isolated incident or destined to be repeated? – Tuesday, October 25th, 5 – 6.30pm
Exhibitions, other events
Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War, an exhibition from the National Library of Medicine, will tour US libraries in 2013 but you can see it online here.
MA or MSc Medical Humanities King’s College London Centre for the Humanities and Health is offering interdisciplinary masters courses including MA or MSc Medical Humanities – a program examining the relationship between the humanities, science and medicine, and how humanistic principles operate in healthcare and clinical practice.
Publications and resources
Calls for submissions
- Special Issue of Feminism & Psychology: DSM-5 and Beyond: A Critical Feminist Dialogue
This Special Issue carries forward the tradition of critical feminist scrutiny of psychiatric diagnosis and of the interplay between psychiatry and the cultural imaginary. For further details, consult the manuscript submission guidelines at the website. To discuss a possible submission or the scope of the issue or to submit a manuscript, contact . (Closing date for submissions is 15 November 2011.) - Legacy: Special issue, "Women Writing Disability"
Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers is soliciting papers for a special issue devoted to the intersection of women, women writers, and disability. This special issue of Legacy will feature scholarship on American women writers dealing with issues of embodiment, illness, cognitive disability, deafness, blindness, mobility, dependency, and other related issues. Send hard-copy of papers to Michael Davidson, Literature Department 0410, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0410. Contact for more information. Completed Papers must be submitted by 1 January 2012. - Present Tense
Present Tense are recruiting submissions for a spring 2012 special issue on medical, gender, and body rhetorics. The special issue will continue investigations on current developments in public health and medicine in order to delineate issues of persuasion, politics, and power. We are seeking submissions on topics including but not limited to: healthcare research and industry, healthcare practice, technology, aesthetics, veterinary medicine, and power relations in medicine. A complete list of topics for the special issue is available online. Priority deadline for the special issue is January 6, 2012. - Queering Fat Embodiment (Tentative title) - This volume will bring together scholarship from various disciplines in order to examine the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts. In queering established ideas about fat bodies, and presenting challenging inquiries/inquiries into these notions, this collection will represent an innovative and critically invaluable contribution to the advancement of scholarship on fatness, and indeed on embodiment more generally. Please send submissions, along with an abstract and a brief bio, directly to Full paper submissions are due January 15, 2012.
- Hektoen International, a journal of medical humanities, is now accepting short articles, poetry, and artwork for its upcoming issues. Please send submissions to Managing Editor, Rachel Baker at journal@hektoeninternational.org, see their website for more details. Please direct any inquiries to Submission deadlines: October 15, 2011 for the winter issue, January 15, 2012 for the spring issue.
- Bioethics in the field: The social (re) production of bioethics in diverse cultural contexts -Social Science & Medicine is seeking papers for a Special Issue that explores how the practical work of bioethics is undertaken in different cultural spaces. W In particular, this Special Issue will broaden the scope of existing approaches to bioethics by examining bioethical work at micro, meso and macro levels. Authors should submit online at http://ees.elsevier.com/ssm/. The deadline for submissions is 31st January 2012.
- From Health Behaviours to Health Practices - Sociology of Health & Illness Monograph
The 20th Sociology of Health and Illness monograph will critically examine the concept of 'health behaviours', which is increasingly widespread in both health research and government policy. The monograph will assess the limitations of the concept of 'health behaviours', including the widespread absence of any discussion of power or conceptualisation of sociality. It will explore whether there are different ways to problematise and conduct research into what people do in relation to their health and their experience of illness. Through both theoretical discussions and specific examples contributors should propose approaches that resist an individualising tendency. Instead they should put forward accounts that go some way to capture the complexities associated both with conventional topics, such as diet, smoking and alcohol consumption, as well as topics not normally conceived of as 'health behaviours', such as features of socialising with others, housing conditions and employment circumstances, which have a significant influence on health and illness.
The monograph will appear both as a regular issue of the journal and in book form. The planned publication date is February 2014. Potential contributors should send an abstract of up to 600 words to by 31st January 2012. - Mosaic – special issue on Blindness.
Mosaic is a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature. They seek submissions relating to any of the following: blindness as disability; blindness in theory; exposition or exposé; architecture's historical and contemporary engagements with light and sight; humanism; image; history and philosophy of the senses; sexual difference; autobiography; surveillance; spectacle; animal ethics; perception; psychoanalysis; prosthesis; weeping; vision and visuality; haunting; gaze; the frontal perspective. Submit online. Deadline February 21, 2012. - Academic Medicine
Seeking submissions inspired the academic medicine experience, in any visual medium, to be featured on the cover of the journal. Submissions should be inspired by some aspect of the “academic medicine experience” – for example, learning how to be a physician or scientist, caring for patients, exploring research questions, making a new discovery, teaching, or being sick in a teaching hospital. Browse AM Cover Art Gallery to view past selections. - Journal for Artistic Research (JAR)
JAR is a new international, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal for the identification, publication and dissemination of artistic research and its methodologies. Visit jar-online.net - Pulse Poetry Submissions
Pulse is a weekly online publication of medical writing. Please review and follow our Submission Guidelines carefully. - ARS MEDICA: A JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
Looking for short fiction, poetry and imagery related to illness, the body, health and recovery. We publish twice per year but accept submissions year-round. - Radius
Radius is accepting poetry submissions from alumni of the University of Sydney. Radius, the joint newsletter of the MAA and Sydney Medical School, is produced three times a year and includes the news, views, events and initiatives of Sydney Medical School. Submit to Dr Lise Mellor. - The Healing Muse
The Healing Muse is accepting submissions from past contributors, new writers and visual artists. Guidelines can be found here. - Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine seeks article submissions for its Arts and Humanities section. Articles may take the form of either analytical pieces of less than 6000 words which supply historical, medical, or policy analysis on a specific topic, or narrative pieces of less than 3000 words which provide personal perspectives on medical or biomedical topics. YJBM is a quarterly journal for the biological and medical communities which is reviewed and edited by Yale biomedical faculty and students. See here for details.
Publications of interest
- Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties edited by Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, Richard C. Keller.
Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others. Go here for details. - Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China by Marta Hanso.
This book traces the history of the Chinese concept of "Warm diseases" (wenbing) from antiquity to the SARS epidemic. Following wenbing from its birth to maturity and even life in modern times Marta Hanson approaches the history of Chinese medicine from a new angle. She explores the possibility of replacing older narratives that stress progress and linear development with accounts that pay attention to geographic, intellectual, and cultural diversity. By doing so her book integrates the history of Chinese medicine into broader historical studies in a way that has not so far been attempted, and addresses a readership much wider than that of Chinese medicine specialists. For more information see here. - Nursing Before Nightingale, 1815 – 1899, by Carol Helmstadter and Judith Godden
Published by Ashgate November 2011; ISBN 978-1-4094-2313-3.
Nursing Before Nightingale is a study of the transformation of nursing in England from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the emergence of the Nightingale nurse as the standard model in the 1890s. From the nineteenth century onwards historians have considered Florence Nightingale, with her training school established at St. Thomas's Hospital in 1860, the founder of modern nursing. This book investigates two major earlier reforms in nursing: a doctor-driven reform which came to be called the 'ward system,' and the reforms of the Anglican Sisters, known as the 'central system' of nursing. Rather than being the beginning of nursing reform, Nightingale nursing was the culmination of these two earlier reforms. This title is also available as an ebook, ISBN 978-1-4094-2314-0.
See here for more details. - Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History and Ethics
Co-edited by Jing Bao Nie, Nanyan Guo, Mark Selden, Arthur Kleinman; Routledge paperback 2011
Prior to and during the Second World War, the Japanese Army established programs of biological warfare throughout China and elsewhere. In these “factories of death,” including the now-infamous Unit 731, Japanese doctors and scientists conducted large numbers of vivisections and experiments on human beings, mostly Chinese nationals. However, as a result of complex historical factors including an American cover-up of the atrocities, Japanese denials, and inadequate responses from successive Chinese governments, justice has never been fully served. This volume brings together the contributions of a group of scholars from different countries and various academic disciplines.
It examines Japan’s wartime medical atrocities and their postwar aftermath from a comparative perspective and inquires into perennial issues of historical memory, science, politics, society and ethics elicited by these rebarbative events. The volume’s central ethical claim is that the failure to bring justice to bear on the systematic abuse of medical research by Japanese military medical personnel more than six decades ago has had a profoundly retarding influence on the development and practice of medical and social ethics in all of East Asia. The book also includes an extensive annotated bibliography selected from relevant publications in Japanese, Chinese and English.
For more information, see http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415583770. - Arts Access Australia monthly e-newsletter is out, you can sign up for it online.