Medical Humanities, a new PCA/ACA Area for 2008, is a burgeoning field that includes cultural intersections of medicine—the human science—and, literature, film, and media—representations of the human experience—through an interdisciplinary approach encompassing medical narratives; illness narrative (also called pathography by Thomas Couser, originating with Freud and Sacks); women’s illness narrative (called pathogynography by R. A. Housel); Rita Charon’s narrative medicine (also referred to by Kleinman as mini-ethnographies), medical poetry by both physicians and patients; representations of medicine, doctors, patients, disease, disability, and death in film and television; the myth of the medicine man; socio-political medicine-related representations in popular culture; monsters and medicine; medical technology, faith, religion, and reason; ethics in/of science, medicine and experimentation; music and medicine; natural healing/homeopathy and popular culture; the mind-body connection; representations of cancer in popular culture; representations of mental illness in popular culture; gendered medicine; hysteria and hysterectomies, etc.

Sophocles wrote Philoctetes in one of the first representations of Medical Humanities. Accounts of medical science, such as Shelley’s Frankenstein, have influenced cultural hegemonic discourse for centuries. Today, doctors at Harvard, Columbia, University of Rochester, and other prominent medical schools are studying the patient’s narrative in an effort to better understand and treat the “whole person”; this technique is called Narrative Medicine, developed by Columbia’s Charon. Films like Finding Neverland, The Doctor, Terms of Endearment, Kinney, and television shows like ER, Gray’s Anatomy and Everwood, attempt to represent and define the role of medicine and science in the postmodern world. Medical Humanities is a space for all of these topics and much more.

Abstracts of papers, individual proposals, and/or panel proposals of 250 words are welcome for the March 19-22, 2008 San Francisco PCA/ACA conference. Please include your name, title, affiliation, and contact information, including email address, and send in-text via email to: Dr. Rebecca Housel, rahgsl@rit.edu

The deadline is November 30, 2007.

The March 19-22, 2008 San Francisco conference will take place in the Bay-area Marriot, conveniently located near Chinatown, San Francisco Bay area restaurants and shopping, the Ghiradelli Chocolate Factory, and easily accessible from the airport. Feel free to contact Rebecca Housel for more information.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Dr. Rebecca Housel, Department of English
College of Liberal Arts
92 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623
585-475-4422~rahgsl@rit.edu