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Making Things Better - a series of free public lectures and seminars brought to you by UCL and The British Museum (sponsored by Novartis and The Wellcome Trust).
Date: Thurs March 9
Time: 6.30 pm
Venue: BP Lecture Theatre, Clore Education Centre, The British Museum, Great Russell St, London
What is a "pharmaceutical person"? This illustrated lecture traces the historical development of personhood in relation to psychotropic drugs over the last few decades in the US. "Pills," or more accurately, "tablets" and "capsules" will be described as products of manufacturing, as means of enhancing personal capacities, and as objects in exhibits. In particular, the underside of pills -- their "side" effects -- will be analyzed in relation to fears and desires characteristic of contemporary US culture.
Professor Martin will explore psychiatric categories involving emotion through ethnographic fieldwork in the contemporary US. How are these categories culturally created, measured and applied; then modified, contested, or rejected in contexts such as clinical rounds, patient advocacy support groups, and internet newsgroups? What are the implications for the personhood of the patient - for the contemporary concept of the person - of treating disorders of mania and depression with psychotropic drugs? What are the stakes of the current broad revaluing of for larger cultural contexts, such as competitive U.S. corporations, which now place a high value on energized, "manic" states for the sake of the innovation and creativity they are believed to yield?
"One of the world's most original and stimulating thinkers grappling with the cultural and social context of science and medicine today" (New Scientist)
Professor Emily Martin, author of Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS and The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, is also the author of the forthcoming Bipolar Expeditions: An Anthropology of Moods. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council and as president of the American Ethnological Society, and is currently at the Institute for the History of Production of Knowledge, NYU.
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