Dear all,

This two-day workshop (14-15 July) will investigate patenting cultures with particular regard to medicine & healthcare.  Medicine and healthcare have always had a close relationship with technology via processes of innovation, but only relatively recently with patents for diagnostic, interventive and therapeutic purposes. Historians increasingly seek to explain how this development occurred in those countries which allowed medical patenting in the late nineteenth century, well before the rise of big pharmaceutical companies and the industry of bone replacements.

-Medicine, Patenting and Ownership in Historical Perspective-
14-15 July 2014
Thackray Medical Museum
(Registration required @ www.rethinkingpatentcultures.com)

Day 1: Monday 14th July
 1 – 1.45pm - Lunch
1.45 – 2pm - Introduction and Outline
James Stark (University of Leeds)

2 – 3.30pm - Session 1: Secrecy and Reward
‘Authority and Ownership:  The Growth and Wilting of Medicine Patenting in Georgian England’
Alan Mackintosh (University of Leeds)
‘Public Rewards or Patents? Parliament and Medical Innovation in the Early Nineteenth Century’
Robert Burrell (University of Sheffield)
Catherine Kelly (University of Western Australia)

3.30 – 3.50pm - Coffee

3.50 – 5.20pm - Session 2: Surgery
‘“Recompense the Sacrifice”: Awarding and Managing Credit in Nineteenth-Century Surgery’
Sally Frampton (Oxford University)
‘Patents, Innovation, and the Transformation of Surgical Instruments in response to Antisepsis and Asepsis, 1885-1925: The Artifact Evidence’
James Edmonson (Case Western Reserve University)

6 – 7pm, Public Panel Debate (Centenary Gallery, University of Leeds)
‘Performing Surgery: Practice and Reconstruction’
Roger Kneebone (Imperial), Alex Cope (Leeds), & Sharon Weldon

Day 2: Tuesday 15th July 
9.30 – 11am - Session 3: Medical Technologies
‘Patenting X-ray Machines in Japan, 1900-1945’
Pierre-Yves Donze (Kyoto University)
‘The Elixir of Life Machine: Patents and the Overbeck Rejuvenator’
James Stark (University of Leeds)

11 – 11.20am - Coffee

11.20am – 12.50pm - Session 4: Contraceptives and Drugs
‘Marketing Contraception and Control: Medical Advertising the Pill in the US and Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s’
Agata Ignaciuk (University of Granada)
‘Black Market Drugs: Pharmaceutical Patenting, Price Monopolies, and the Bifurcation of Therapeutic of Markets in the United States, 1887-1914’
Joseph Gabriel (Florida State University)

12.50 – 2pm - Lunch

2 – 3.30pm – Session 5: Medical Patenting and the Law
‘Revisiting the Exclusion of Methods of Medical Treatment in the United Kingdom and Europe’
Eddy Ventose (University of the West Indies)
‘Pricing Pharma: Constructing Markets through Patent and Competition Laws’
Shubha Ghosh (University of Wisconsin)

3.30 – 4pm - Closing Discussion
 ‘What can we learn from the history of medical patenting?’
Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds)
Claire Jones (University of Leeds)
Aurora Plomer (University of Sheffield)