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From:   Malte Herwig <[log in to unmask]>

CALL FOR PAPERS

Framing and Imagining Disease: The Ancient to Modern Worlds

International Colloquium, New College, Oxford, Saturday 26 October and
Sunday 27 October 2002.

Following our meeting in Paris in May, this message is to confirm the date of
the two-day colloquium at New College, Oxford, in October, and to make a
final call for papers. Please note that we have opened up the chronological
boundaries to include the ancient world and the 20th century.

If you are interested in making a formal, 20 minute presentation, and
submitting a 6,000 word paper for possible publication in a collection of
proceedings, please submit an abstract to David Haycock
([log in to unmask]) by 7 July 2002.

If you have already submitted an abstract, the final date for the submission of
your draft paper is 30 September 2002.

If you have any queries regarding the colloquium please contact David
Haycock. A full list of presenters and the titles of their papers will be sent out
in mid July.


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.

We invite papers from any historical era or geographical region
which approach the framing and imagining of disease in some of these
ways. While we are not prejudiced against theoretical formations or
the privileging of particular themes and tropes, we will give
preference in this colloquium to scholars whose approach is
primarily empirical and historical, and - crucially - to those who
aim to have their work included in the volume now in preparation.


Convening Committee:

Professor George Rousseau, De Montfort University, Leicester; Kirstie Blair,
Keble College, Oxford; Miranda Gill, New College, Oxford; Dr David Haycock,
Wolfson College, Oxford; Malte Herwig, Merton College, Oxford

--
MALTE HERWIG
Junior Research Fellow in German Literature & History of Science
Merton College, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 4JD, England