‘Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness’: Conference, Chicago, 9-11 June 2011

This second international interdisciplinary conference* aims explore the past, present, and possible future of comics in the context of the healthcare experience.  Programs in medical humanities have long touted the benefits of reading literature and studying visual art in the medical setting, but the use of comics in healthcare practice and education is relatively new.  The melding of text and image has much to offer all members of the healthcare team, including patients and families.  As such, a subgenre of graphic narrative known as graphic medicine is emerging as a field of interest to both scholars and creators of comics.
We are pleased to confirm two important keynote speakers: David Small, author of ‘Stitches’ and Phoebe Gloeckner, author of ‘A Child’s Life’
We invite proposals for scholarly papers (15 minutes), poster presentations, and panel discussions (60 minutes), focused on medicine and comics in any form (e.g., graphic novels, comic strips, graphic pathographies, manga, and/or web comics) on the following—and related—topics:

• graphic pathographies of illness and disability
• the use of comics in medical education
• the use of comics in patient care
• the interface of graphic medicine and other visual arts in popular
• culture
• ethical implications for using comics to educate the public
• ethical implications of patient representation in comics by
• healthcare providers
• trends in international use of comics in healthcare settings
• the role of comics in provider/patient communication
• comics as a virtual support group for patients and caregivers
• the use of comics in bioethics discussions and education

We also welcome workshops (120 minutes) by creators of comics on the process, rationale, methods, and general theories behind the use of comics to explore medical themes. These are intended to be “hands-on” interactive workshops for participants who wish to obtain particular skills with regard to the creation or teaching about comics in the medical context.
We envision this gathering as a collaboration among humanities scholars, comics scholars, comics creators, healthcare professionals, and comics enthusiasts.
300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday, 28 February 2011 to submissions@graphicmedicine.org. Proposals may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract.  Please identify your presentation preference: 1) oral presentation; 2) poster presentation; 3) panel discussion; or 4) workshop. While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice, we will attempt to honor people’s preferences, and will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals submitted. Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by 14 March 2011.
This event is co-sponsored by the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine, and the Science, Technology and Society Program of Penn State University, and is supported by a grant from the Charles Schulz Foundation.
*Information about the 2010 conference, “Comics and Medicine: Medical
Narrative in Graphic Novels,” in London, England can be found at
www.graphicmedicine.org.
Dr Ian Williams

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Medicine Unboxed 2011: Medicine and Values, Cheltenham UK 15 October 2011

Good medicine is more than a set of technical decisions and interventions involving
drugs, operations or tests. It demands more of the practitioner - professionalism,
empathetic care, moral consideration, insight, an understanding of human suffering
and necessarily, wisdom. These attributes are not always prioritised in selecting
for or training healthcare professionals, and there is little time or attention
given to their authentic development within busy working environments. Further,
there is a widening hiatus of trust, understanding and expectation between medicine
and society around what constitutes good medicine. This pressingly requires real
engagement around medicine’s role and society’s values. A purely scientific answer
will never prove sufficient here.

Medicine Unboxed is a unique project and conference programme that engages both the
public and front-line NHS staff with a view of medicine that is infused and
elaborated by the humanities. Contributors include artists, writers, the clergy,
poets, philosophers, lawyers, linguists, musicians, theatre, ethicists, academics
and doctors. The results are thought-provoking, inspiring, sometimes funny and often
moving.

Our theme this year is Medicine and Values.

We think of medicine as simply fact-based, efficient and scientifically robust.
These arbiters can become the measures of good medicine. However, medicine is
infused with judgments of value - individually for doctors and patients but also in
medical science, for society, for policy-makers and health economists. Ethics, law
and religion inform duties and rights in medicine, through principles and values.
The values that define good medicine are not always apparent or agreed upon and
there remains the potential for tension between them.

We'd like to invite you to come along to Medicine Unboxed 2011 and join us in
uncovering the values that pertain to medical care and debating the ambivalences
around the arbiters of good medicine. Our speakers this year include the Rev. John
Bell, John Carey, Lionel Shriver, Jo Shapcott, Ray Tallis, Paul Bailey, Michael
Arditti and Havi Carel.

Come to the debate - be inspired.

Sam Guglani, Consultant Clinical Oncologist.
http://medicineunboxed.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=040c885489432f9ea79fbd23b&id=f00835b9f4&e=1767bdcee5

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2011 International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine

I recently attended the 2nd Annual Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Symposium, which was held at Warwick Medical School and hosted by Professor Donald Singer and Associate Professor Michael Hulse. During the day, a group of researchers and clinicians from a variety of backgrounds gathered to explore the role of poetry in the discourse of medicine, including renowned poets, Marilyn Hacker and Gwyneth Lewis.
Themes included: 
history of interactions between medicine, health and poetry; impact of health and disease on the writings of the professional poet; poetry as therapy; the nature of the body, and anatomy; the history, evolution, current and future state of medical science; the nature and experience of tests; use of poetry in health professional training, the experience of doctors, nurses and other staff in hospitals and in the community; the experience of patients, families, friends and carers in these situations; the experiences of acute and long-term illness and dying, of birth, of cure and convalescence; the patient journey; the nature and experience of treatment with herbs, chemicals and devices used in medicine.
The diversity of both the themes and the backgrounds of the presenters, and attendees, signify a very important movement in contemporary medical practice; namely, to address the experience of practicing medicine, and the humanistic elements of the doctor and patient interaction.
Our contemporary clinical settings are surrounded by an array of machines, sterility, and the attempt to reach purity through the annihilation of disease and illness. During this battle, it is all too easy to lose the identity of who we are and who we are fighting for amongst the technology and techniques we can enact to engage with pathology. Yet, when the body is inflamed, and inflicted, with the wars between health and illness, and life and death, the nature of poetry reveals itself to be fundamental to our experience of being human. And this awareness was achieved throughout the symposium, with speakers such as Professor Femi Oyebode declaring the “same skills you need to write are the same skills you need to be a good doctor”.
In parallel to descriptions of symptoms and diagnoses, poetry describes the inner states of a person, the territory immune from any form of empirical probing. A poem is, in itself, a “machine made of words” (William Carlos Williams). The words one writes have a function; they are not just ethereal images and metaphors, or, as another of the presenters, Dr Sandy Goldbeck-Wood said, “poetry embodies the indescribable – poetry has a physical element; it encodes suffering”.
Such communication is vital for Medicine’s endeavor; to heal, the wound must be identified.
The identification of wounds in individuals and communities are both bodies of symptoms, exuberating into the environment which contains our living presence. This was illustrated most poignantly by the work of Dr Sorcha Gunne, who has analysed women’s poetry about HIV/Aids in South Africa.
Through a person’s narrative, a discourse forms, and in medicine it is one that serves the doctor and patient relationship.
Fiona Hamilton, from the writing organization, LAPIDUS, describes narratives as tools that “allow for confrontation between doctors and patients without jeopardizing the emotional disassociation required”. Poetry was also demonstrated to be an indiscriminate force; physical boundaries and limitations are transcended. Age, gender, culture, ethnicity, are irrelevant. Speakers Dr Simon Opher and Karen Hayes presented an exceptional project, working with elderly patients affected by dementia to reconstruct memory through metaphor – one of the last language functions to deteriorate in Alzheimer’s disease – and return to them their stories, because “stories are the architecture of who we are”.
On the other side of the spectrum – and world – Dr Renee Liang of New Zealand, showed the success of community initiatives that encourage under-privileged young people to release their frustrations and anger – as well as pride and joy – through poetry, and the positive impact that this has on their health.
The poem, though, is also for the healer. Nurse, Sue Spencer, described techniques for teaching nurses in medical education the value of words for the “(he)art of nursing”.
It also became apparent that medicine’s healing hands write in arenas other than the surgery, the hospital, the care home. Reflection on our human condition; its fragility and its robustness is part of the world we embody, and Rogan Wolf’s presentation “Poems in Public on the Frontier” personified this notion.
Finally, towards the end of a day characterized by moments of epiphany and realization of connections between the body and the mind, medicine and the human condition, there was a very special announcement. The symposium also marked the occasion to announce the winners of the annual International Hippocrates Poetry prize:
The winners of the open international awards were: ▪ 1st Prize: Michael Henry (Cheltenham, England) – The Patella Hammer. ▪ 2nd Prize: Cheryl Moskowitz (London, England) – Correspondence with the Care Home. ▪ 3rd Prize: Johanna Emeney (Albany, New Zealand) – Radiologist’s Report.
The winners of the NHS category awards were: ▪ 1st Prize: Paula Cunningham (Belfast, N Ireland) – The Chief Radiographer Considers. ▪ 2nd Prize: Wendy French (London, England) – The Doctor’s Wife. 3rd Prize: Dr Sandy Goldbeck-Wood (Cambridge, England) – Inappropriate ADH.

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The Drama of Medicine-All the Ward’s a Stage: 8th Annual AMH Conference, 11-13 July 2011, University of Leicester,UK

Plans for the 8th annual conference of the Association for Medical Humanities are now well underway, with an exciting line up of papers, workshops and plenary speakers. Celebrated poet and doctor Dannie Abse will be running a session entitled Poet in a White Coat; Jed Mercurio, author of Bodies and creator of the TV series Cardiac Arrest, will speak on the Doctor as Antihero;  Professor Laurie Maguire, from Magdalen College Oxford, will explore Shakespeare’s guide to health and illness; and Matthew Alexander from North Carolina, a leading authority on the use of cinema in medical education, will begin the conference with a workshop and plenary address on this subject.
Other workshops cover medicine in comics, architecture in health and photography, and a video of experiences in a heart and lung transplant unit.  There are nearly 50 short papers exploring the conference themes of Dramatis personae (people), Plays and Plots (stories), and The Stage (settings and environments).
Delegates are attending from throughout the UK ,as well as from the Republic of Ireland, Canada, the USA and Sri Lanka.  Sign up soon to join them!
To book either a full residential package or a day delegate spot, go on-line at www.shop.le.ac.uk For any queries contact the conference team at amhconf@le.ac.uk
Whether you’re a seasoned AMH member, or simply someone who wants to find out more about medical humanities, this is sure to be an enjoyable and thought provoking way to spend a couple of days.

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