Online Workshop, 9-10 September 2021 (general information and programme)

 

 

 “A properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities.”*

What potential relevance does the experience of Graeco-Roman antiquity have to the emerging field of the critical medical humanities and their mission to ‘humanise’ today’s medical and healthcare practice, education and research? This two-day workshop brings together specialists from around the world to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue about healthcare and the conceptualization of well-being and illness, with a specific emphasis on what role Graeco-Roman antiquity can play for healthcare providers and users today.

 

By turning to, and drawing inspiration from, ancient Greek and Roman sources (medical or otherwise), the workshop is intended to yield fresh insights into issues such as the ideology of health, narratives of illness, the confrontation with mortality, the importance of professional ethics, and so on. What does it mean to be a (healthy) human being? What is the value of ‘making sense’ of trauma and loss? What are the role, value and requirements of human qualities in the context of healthcare? What useful strategies do ancient sources propose for living ‘well’ with chronic pain, disability, illness? Central to our endeavour will be to explore (but also debate) the continuing creativity and vitality inherent in the classical tradition, hence our specific interest in the use of classical themes and motifs in/for creative and expressive arts therapy.

 

The event will take place via Zoom, 9-10 September 2021, and is open to students and teachers of classics/medicine and adjacent fields as well as to the general public. If you are interested to participate, please send a message to healingclassics2021@gmail.com and we will send you the link to the Zoom meeting and collected abstracts. The workshop programme is as follows (London time applies):

 Thursday 9 September

 

12.50-13.00: Welcome

 

13.00-13.10: Introduction (Michiel Meeusen)

 

13.10-14.10: Session 1 (chair: Michiel Meeusen)

- 13.10-13.20: Mary Margaret McCabe (KCL), “Health, disease and the context of a life”

- 13.20-13.30: Edith Hall (KCL), “Psychic Pain and its Survival: The Chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon”

- 13.30-13.40: Chiara Blanco (Trinity College, Oxford), “Disease, Community and Communication from Antiquity to Today”

- 13.40-14.10: roundtable discussion

 

14.10-15.10: Session 2 (chair: Michael Trapp)

- 14.10-14.20: Tania Gergel (KCL), “Odysseus and the Sirens - can a Homeric myth offer insights for contemporary psychiatry?”

- 14.20-14.30: Nephele Papakonstantinou (Sorbonne/Athens), “Embodied emotions and the self in Roman Rhetorical Education under the High Empire”

- 14.30-14.40: Chiara Thumiger (Kiel), “‘Cura eum possideat’. Disease as animal, disease as plant”

- 14.40-15.10: roundtable discussion

 

15.10-15.30: Tea

 

15.30-16.30: Session 3 (chair: Brian Hurwitz)

- 15.30-15.40: Peter Meineck (NYU), “(Re) Performing Trauma – A Field Report”

-15.40-15.50: Ellen Adams (KCL), “Blindness: classical antiquity and modernity”

- 15.60-16.00: Susan Deacy (Roehampton), ‘Sounds like being autistic’: how the ‘classical tradition’, especially myths of Hercules, resonates with autism

- 16.00-16.30: roundtable discussion

 

16.30-17.30: Session 4 (chair: Michiel Meeusen)

- 16.30-16.40: Daniel King (Exeter), “Reading the Ill Body: Diagnosis as an explanatory process in Imperial medicine and culture”

- 16.40-16.50: Kassandra Miller (Colby College), “Who Has Time to Exercise? Health, Leisure, and Identity in Galen’s On Hygiene”

- 16.50-17.00: Colin Webster (UC Davis), “On Living Longer and Dying More: Empirical and Imperial Epistemologies in Antiquity and the Present.”

- 17.00-17.30: roundtable discussion

  

Friday 10 September

 

9.00-9.10: Welcome

 

9.10-10.10: Session 5 (chair: Brian Hurwitz)

- 9.10-9.20: John Boulton (University of Newcastle, NSW), “Dignitas infanti mortuo”

- 9.20-9.30: John Ward (University of Newcastle, NSW), “Corellius’s choice: autonomy, ethics, and dying with dignity”

- 9.30-9.40: Vasiliki Kondylaki (Lausanne), “Achilles’ ἄχος in the Iliad: Homer as a grief therapist?”

- 9.40-10.10: roundtable discussion

 

10.10-11.10: Session 6 (chair: Michiel Meeusen)

- 10.10-10.20: Brian Hurwitz (KCL), “A New Rationale for the Performance of Trickery as Treatment in Epidemics VI 5.7”

- 10.20-10.30: Loren Demol (Macquarie University), “Patient Care in Ancient Graeco-Roman Medicine”

- 10.30-10.40: Saloni de Souza (UCL), “When the Age is in, So is the Wit: Old Age in Health and Social Care”

- 10.40-11.10: roundtable discussion

 

11.10-11.20: Coffee

 

11.20-12.00: Session 7 (chair: Michael Trapp)

- 11.20-11.30: Georgia Petridou (Liverpool), “Encountering the Greats of the First Sophistic in the Second Century AD: Poetic Epiphanies and Healing in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi”

- 11.30-11.40: Corinne Saunders (Durham), “Dark Nights and Visionary Moments: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Narrative”

- 11.40-12.00: roundtable discussion

 

12.00-…: General discussion, future plans, conclusion

 

Organising committee at King’s College London: Prof. Michael Trapp, Prof. Brian Hurwitz, Dr. Michiel Meeusen

    

 

* C. Saunders, “Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing”, in J. Richards, S. Atkinson, J. Macnaughton, A. Woods & A. Whitehead (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Edinburgh, 2016: 411-427, at 411.