Retelling familiar tales of pregnancy and birth in European cultures

CALL FOR PAPERS: Retelling familiar tales of pregnancy and birth in European cultures

Tues 3rd-Weds 4th July 2012, Oxford

Purpose of conference

This conference aims to bring together leading specialists from a range of the medical humanities with healthcare professionals to explore the trope of the retelling of stories about pregnancy and birth. While recent work has considered the way in which stories of exceptional pregnancies and unusual births have been told again and again over western history, from Greek mythology and the Old Testament until the present day, the methodological and intellectual questions raised by these retellings have not been discussed in detail. Taking a very broad geographic and chronological focus (Europe from Antiquity to the present day), our objective is to encourage innovative interdisciplinary exchanges by addressing the following questions. How did the growth of print culture in Europe encourage the retelling of familiar birthing tales, and how were new ones added? Why did some stories of pregnancy and birth circulate more widely than others? When stories are retold, which details of the original are always retained, which are lost in the retelling, and how and why do new accretions creep into the story?

Sessions

The gathering particularly looks to provide the opportunity for discussion and exchange on both substance and methodology between, on the one hand, a wide range of academic disciplines contributing to the medical humanities (e.g. cultural history, art history, history of the book, literary scholars) and, on the other hand, health-care practitioners who have been increasingly focused on the oral transmission of case histories (midwives, obstetricians and gynaecologists, psychiatrists). The four sessions proposed are thus wide-ranging and deliberately aim to juxtapose contributions from academics and practitioners in the various sessions.

1) The trope of repetition, or why some tales of pregnancy and birth are retold

2) Exploring accretion and loss: how tales are retold across time (Antiquity to the present) and across different geographic and cultural European contexts

3) Who sees or experiences, who tells and who reads repeated tales: patients, practitioners, witnesses and readers:

4) The significance of the material circulation of repeated tales in word and image

Keynote plenary session: Professor Monica Green (Arizona State University)


Practical Details

The conference sessions, including lunches and dinners, will be held in Lady Margaret Hall, a college of the University of Oxford, located in attractive grounds in the north of the city. We are looking to provide bed and breakfast accommodation in another Oxford college for the nights of 2-3-4 July 2012 for delegates who wish to take advantage of this. Alternatively, Oxford has a range of good guesthouses and hotels for those wishing to organise their own accommodation. We hope to have some bursary support available for students.

Submitting a proposal for a paper

Please email all proposals for papers to Professor Helen King (h.king@open.ac.uk) by 3 April 2012. Papers should last for 20 minutes to allow 10 minutes discussion after each speaker. A proposal should give the title of the paper, an abstract of up to 400 words, and your contact details. Proposals for shared papers or panels are particularly welcome, as are poster presentations. The working language of the conference will be English.

All proposals will be considered by the organising panel: Professor Helen King (Open University), Dr Janette Allotey (Manchester, Chair of De Partu History of Childbirth Group, University of Manchester, and Professor Valerie Worth (Trinity College Oxford)

Book surgery

Artist Brian Dettmer turns old reference books into new works of art using surgical tools. Isn't this gorgeous?

Association for Medical Humanities Annual Conference

University College Cork, July 9-11, 2012
The 2012 conference of the Association for Medical Humanities will take place at University College Cork, Ireland, with the kind support of the Wellcome Trust. Organised in conjunction with the Consortium for Medical Humanities, an inter-University initiative to develop research in Medical Humanities in Ireland, the theme is ‘Medical Identities: patients and professionals’, and we hope that it is one that will allow for a broad interpretation of the development of the profession, and of the people who use and serve it. Themes may include:

• Local, regional and national medical identities related to place and space.

• Medical migrants (movement in search of treatment and training)

• The impact of culture, politics and socialisation on medical practice

• The development of identities – professional hierarchies within and between specialisms

• Alternative therapies

• Rise of advocacy groups – the emergence of a collective patient identity

• Professional organisation – the development of the BMA/IMA

• Changes in identity as a result of medical intervention – amputees, etc.

• Medicine in war

• Patient as consumer: private medical care

• Charitable medicine – Medecins Sans Frontieres versus medical missionaries

Keynote Speakers:

Prof Ivor Browne, author of ‘Music and Madness’, Emeritus Prof of Psychiatry, UCD

Prof Jane Macnaughton, CAHHM, Durham University

Prof Steven King, Centre for Medical Humanities, University of Leicester


Conference Organising Committee:

Dr Oonagh Walsh, University College Cork, Dr Ciara Breathnach, University of Limerick, and Dr Olwen Purdue, Queen’s University Belfast.

Please send a 200 word proposal to the organisers at medhumsireland@gmail.com Suggestions for panels are also welcomed.

Sublime Body seeks performers

A newly formed Arts Organisation called Parlour Arts is looking for artists and performers for their upcoming exhibition, "The Sublime Body". The exhibition will take place in the Parlour Space in Kentish Town 27th February- 4th March. They have already begun taking submissions of visual artworks, but are now looking for performers to perform on the closing night of the exhibition. The performance can take any form from spoken word to dance to music to film or short plays. This is a great opportunity for new artists and performers to show off their work and one not to be missed. For more information and to register interest, please contact Fiona Bradley, Parlour Arts

Classics for ethics?

I’ve been invited to deliver a masterclass in using classical literature to teach ethics at the Institute of Medical Ethics Conference next month. I’m really looking forward to it, not least because three former students are up for the Mark Brenner prize for creative approaches to ethical issues in clinical attachments. Good luck Matt, Rory and Rebecca.

Classical literature for narrative source material for ethics, as distinct from contemporary literature, has made me think about the characteristics of classics. For a novel or short story to be considered a classic, it has to have withstood the rigours of time and competition. Its themes, characters and/or plot have a value that transcends period and place, making it worthy of our attention – and still relevant -- many years after it was penned. Classics are paradigmatic. They are touchstones for cultural excellence. But does their status mean we come to them with a less open mind about the moral stances they might advocate?

Reading a classic absolves the reader of the judging whether something is ‘good literature’ or not. That decision has already been made collectively for us by cultural consensus, aided and abetted by those who decide school syllabuses, write textbooks or are editors for publishers’ ‘Classics’ series. I find that I approach the reading of a classic with a different mindset to when I read contemporary literature. When a text is taken for granted as ‘good’, I feel an obligation as reader to ‘be improved’ by my reading. I must seek out what has been deemed good about a text and be appropriately appreciative. Happily, this is rarely onerous. With the possible exception of Ulysses, I have enjoyed reading the canonical texts in medical humanities: Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Magic Mountain… (is there a correlation between titles starting with ‘M’ and classic status?).

Writing in the introduction to the excellent book Stories and their Limits, Nelson says that ethics took a ‘personal turn’ in the 1980s away from the impartialist approach (with its emphasis on universalism) to focus instead on the value of moral significance of individual relationships (love, friendship, community). Might the ‘classic’ status of a text imply a framework of universalism that sets it at odds with the preoccupations of the personal that are intrinsic to narrative ethics? Do classics already have a presupposed strong moral force that is inescapable for the reader? It is well known that we practise ‘confirmation bias’ in that we tend to favour stances that support positions that we are already committed to. If a narrative has attained classic status, it might well be because it tells us a story that conforms to a collective sense of morality. Can we then be sufficiently critically available enough to really open up a text to moral investigation? After all, as John Arras writes in his sardonically entitled chapter ‘Nice story, so what?’ (Stories and their Limits), ‘Ethics without judgment is not ethics.’

A counter-argument would be that classics are often provocative rather than complacent in their moral stances. The moral ambiguity in the writings of Shakespeare, Kafka, Shelley, Tolstoy, Chekhov and many of the other ‘greats’ is what helps to elevate their texts to ‘classic’ status. It contributes to why they are still amenable to seemingly inexhaustible analysis, in spite of all the intervening years of scholarship and debate.

Does a certifiably good story intrinsically have a moral dimension? The French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve certainly thought so. He wrote in 1850: “A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth” (my emphasis). I think it is almost always possible to find a moral dimension in classic texts that have a medical motif. If ethical issues do not suggest themselves in the plot or character, there may be discussion points around the relationship of the author to matters medical, or about how medicine is represented as a profession. One of the advantages of studying classics is that it demands a consideration of context. It compels us to put aside current legal frameworks and norms, and really think about how morality is narratively shaped.

Medfest 2012

News of a wonderful medically themed film festival touring the UK. This is the second year of the festival which aims to provoke debate on the ethics and politics of doctors on film. This year's theme is 'HealthScreen - understanding illness through film'. The first event is at Birmingham University on 7 February with 15 further events at medical schools around the UK. Education films, health information films and mainstream Hollywood movies will all be considered. Each event is free with no ticket required. Entry is on a first-come basis. More details here.

Blog redesign

When this blog was started some eight years ago, it was envisaged as a place where students from the Imperial College Medical Humanities course could share their writing and any medical humanities activities. This worked well for many years, but since then, the websphere has changed, as has the nature of medical education. An explosion in social media means that students no longer need a formal space in which to showcase their writing. Many have blogs of their own or rely on Facebook to raise their profile. Also students have such full timetables that it is unrealistic to expect long-term commitments to writing for a group blog. So, whilst I still envisage inviting posts from students and others associated with the course at Imperial, I'm going to take ownership of the blog and try to write more myself. I'm pretty sure this was the first blog devoted to medical humanities, and it's been nice to see other groups set up their own blogs to tell us about their activities. I'll be posting links to UK medical humanities conferences and events, so please let me know if you would like anything included. I won't be adding or accepting sponsored links. I'm in the process of updating the blog roll, so will be accepting suggestions for relevant sites.