Framing & Imagining Disease: The Ancient to Modern Worlds. An
international, interdisciplinary colloquium at New College, Oxford on
October 26th and 27th October 2002. Convened under the directorship of
Professor George Rousseau of De Montfort University, Leicester.
FURTHER INFORMATION
www.framingdisease.co.uk
website includes speakers, abstracts, programme etc.)
CONTACT
Miranda Gill ([log in to unmask])
STATEMENT
The cultural understanding of medicine includes treatment of the frames and
forms of imagination through which, and inside which, disease is
constructed. These formative processes are complex and ordinarily require
broad historical contexts for their conceptualization. Their problematic is
multiple: the many meanings given to pain, suffering, deprivation, death
and, especially, the illness diagnoses offered by medical practitioners.
But they also construe language and discourse as inherent to the process.
For these reasons, narrative, genre, and metaphor assume larger roles than
are ordinarily apparent in the work of historians of medicine and others
specialists interested in the historical formation of disease. The "frame"
then is an inherently interdisciplinary grid in the sense that it belongs
to no single discourse or historical or national mentality.
For further thoughts, see Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden (eds),
Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1992
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