The Language of Illness and Pain
Identity, Communication and the Clinical Encounter

Date: Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd July 2011
Venue: Birkbeck College, University of London

Following the establishment of the British medical profession in the nineteenth century, which endorsed the concept of medicine as a science, the clinical encounter between doctor and patient came to occupy a contested territory with equally contested boundaries. The period saw a theoretical and practical shift away from the classical perception of medicine as an art, based on the patient's story of his or her illness, to medicine as a science, based on the doctor's clinical observations and supported by the rapid increase in technical training and new scientific procedures.

Arguably the effect of this development was to suppress the patient's identity and voice. It also sidelined psychologically-driven theories, which were thought to lack evidence-based scientific rigour and were regarded as inferior to biomedical practice. As a result, conditions and identities associated with the troubled mind and with anti-social behaviours, for example, were pathologised to bring them into the province of orthodox treatments. The cure rate for the new taxonomies of stigmatised identities and psychosomatic conditions was disappointing. Moreover there was considerable confusion at the interface between the disciplines of law, medicine, psychology, and social science in relation to distinctions between normal behaviour and deviancy, between the criminal and the patient, and between the mad and the bad.

This interdisciplinary and trans-historical conference seeks to examine the legacy of these trends through the analysis of communication and language in the clinical encounter, as it is represented in medicine and in the humanities.  The objective is to break down the artificial boundaries between the arts and biomedical science to identify mutually beneficial fields of enquiry. In particular the conference aims to establish a forum in which academics, practitioners and students in the medical profession and in humanities can interrogate and evaluate the clinical encounter, the relationship between doctor and patient, and the language of illness and pain. The intention is to publish a collection of the best conference papers in a medical humanities book that will be of interest to the general reader but which can also be used by students and academics in teaching and research.

The conference is the result of the collaboration between Medical Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London and the Kent, Surrey and Sussex Medical Deanery.  It takes part over two days - Saturday and Sunday 2nd-3rd July 2011. Refreshments and lunches are provided and there will be a wine reception on Saturday, followed by a screening of Wit, the American TV drama based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson, directed by Nike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson. Formal presentations end at lunchtime on Sunday and will be followed in the afternoon by a talk at the British Museum in the Wellcome Trust-sponsored Living and Dying Room.

The conference will be supported by an exhibition, which will include books, music, and visual art, which explore representations of, and the creative interaction between medicine and the humanities throughout the ages.



CFP: We invite proposals (300 words max) for 20-minute papers from academics and practitioners in the fields of the humanities and medicine, which explore any aspect of communication, language, narrative, and representation in relation to illness and pain. Proposals for panels of three speakers are welcome.

The following list of ideas is intended as a guideline only:

*       Altered mental states
*       Collective illness, collective healing
*       Cultural perceptions of illness: gender, class, and ethnicity
*       Cure or healing?
*       Difference, otherness and pathologised identity
*       Identity and the 12-step programme
*       Illness, language and writing
*       Illness as metaphor
*       Illness and creativity / genius and madness
*       It's all in the mind
*       Medicine and anthropology
*       Medicine and music
*       Medicine and place: exteriors and interiors
*       Medicine and ritual
*       Medicine and visual culture
*       Narrative medicine and the clinical encounter
*       Narrative, identity and psychoanalysis
*       Narrative and the case history
*       The art of dying
*       The fictional doctor and patient
*       The medical autobiography / memoir
*       The Illness memoir
*       The language of pain
*       The language and lure of 'Bad Science'
*       The poetry of pain
*       Symbolic medicine: the staff of Asklepios and the caduceus of Hermes
*       Trauma and language
*       Western biomedicine and trans-cultural practices
*       Who owns the illness?

Format: Given the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, we would like papers to be accessible to all participants. If your proposal is accepted we will ask you to provide a short handout in advance of the conference, which includes an abstract that sets out your key arguments followed by brief definitions of terminology.

CPD points for clinicians: Given the contribution the conference will make to clinical practice, CPD credits may be claimed under your individual College guidelines.

The deadline for proposals is Friday 25th February. Please contact Debbie Harrison ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Jo Winning ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>). We would be delighted to discuss your ideas informally in advance. The website (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/research/research_conferences/language_illness_pain) will be updated regularly to provide further information about plenary speakers, accommodation options, parking arrangements etc.  Birkbeck's facilities include wheelchair access.




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