Knowledge, Ethics and Representations of Medicine and Health: Historical Perspectives

Society for the Social History of Medicine 2010 Annual Conference
"Knowledge, Ethics and Representations of Medicine and Health: Historical Perspectives"
Durham, UK. Thursday 8th to Sunday 11th July 2010

Organised by the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine and jointly hosted by Durham and Newcastle Universities.

Key-note speakers:

Dr Tim Boon (Science Museum, London, UK)
'On the Varieties of Medical Filmmaking: An Alternative Path to the Cultures of Bio-Medicine'

Professor Martha Few (University of Arizona, USA)
'The Fetus as Colonial Subject: Gender, Reproduction, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic'

Professor Dr Thomas Lemke (Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
'Biosociality, health and citizenship'

Professor Heinrich von Staden (Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, USA)
'Experiments on Living Animals: Private and Public Science in Ancient Greece and Rome'

Session themes include:

What processes have generated knowledge about the body, illness and health that has become authoritative in different societies?
How have claims of medical expertise been justified vis à vis claims from other domains of social and cultural authority such as religion and law?
What did it mean for medical practitioners in different cultural and social contexts to claim to be ethical as well as knowledgeable?
How did they present themselves to the public?
What kind of material, visual and textual representations of body, mind, health and disease have gained ‘defining power’ exerting influence on medical practice and research until today?

For more information on the SSHM please see www.sshm.org.