Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics program presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

John Franklin M.D., M.Sc, MA
Associate Dean, Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Student Support
Professor of Psychiatry, Transplant Surgery and Medical Education
Medical Humanities and Bioethics
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Consciousness Explained! (well, not really)
– The Medicine and Consciousness Seminar

This talk will discuss the derivation, evolution, objective, and content of a medical humanities seminar that's been taught to medical students for the past 10 years. The goals of this short medical humanities seminar are: to begin a definition of “consciousness”; know some of the history of thought on the subject; appreciate the staggering neuroscience complexities implicated, and most importantly; discover just some of the ways concepts regarding consciousness relate to the practice of medicine. By tackling the same vagaries of consciousness during this discussion, we too will step into the maze of consciousness studies, and hopefully, find our way out!

Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics program presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Anna Fenton-Hathaway, PhD
Managing Editor, Literature and Medicine
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Dystopia Medicine

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) became the top-selling book at Amazon in January of this year, and Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale (1985) rose to the top ten of the same list in February. Classic dystopias—not to mention newer, young adult versions such as The Hunger Games (2008-10) and Divergent (2011-13) trilogies—are hot these days. While the surge of interest in these tales is most readily explained by new political realities, two essays in a recent issue of Literature and Medicine prompted me to ask how health care functions in, or even helps to define, these imagined worlds—and to explore the ways those and other dystopias are being used by health professionals and health policymakers to shape real-world medicine.

Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics program,
in co-sponsorship with the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program

presents

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, PhD
Assistant Professor
International Studies Department
Macalester College
Saint Paul, Minnesota

This talk addresses a specific album from the 1890s found among Ottoman sultan Abdülhamit's collection which shows female patients of the Haseki Women's Hospital after they have regained their health. These formal portraits show each patient modestly dressed in hospital issued uniform yet baring her abdomen to show a surgical scar. In a bell jar on the ornate table each woman leans on is displayed the tumor removed by the gynecological surgeon. How might we make sense of the surgeon's signature on each plate (and differently on each abdomen in the form of a scar) despite the images having been made by a prominent studio photographer? How does this album require us to rethink agency in photography? How do we make sense of these images displaying that which was once internal to these women, to themselves, the surgeon and the sultan? Does the appearance of these images in an album at the palace collapse traditional differences between medical and political imaging technologies? How is care being visualized and to what political end? What kinds of relationships are materialized in this album?

The photo albums of Ottoman sultan and Islamic leader Abdulhamit II (1876-1909) who dispatched photographers to four corners of his empire contain some 35,000 images. This visual archive documents state projects such as military and government buildings, hospitals, factories, massive engineering projects, schools, mosques, and cityscapes, and includes a large collection of police photographs. The sultan’s collection also contains albums sent to him by diplomats, foreign heads of state and individual foreigners and Ottoman subjects, including doctors.

Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics program presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Cecilio M. Cooper, MA
Doctoral Candidate, Department of African American Studies
Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Instructor and Graduate Affiliate
    Medical Humanities and Bioethics Graduate Program
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

The Miracle of the Black Leg: On Blackness, Amputation, and Medical Knowledge

A Roman dreamt that Cosmas and Damian amputated an Ethiopian’s healthy limb so that it could be transplanted onto his own ailing body. So states the "Miracle of the Black Leg." It is among the legendary healings linked to the pair’s canonization as patron saints of medicine. This talk explores what this medical miracle reveals about how blackness figures as a means for knowledge production in science and medicine.

Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics program presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Richard J. Miller, PhD
Alfred Newton Richards Professor
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

The Really Big Rivals

The debate between Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta on whether animals were capable of making electricity was one of the most important in the history of science. A newly discovered play by their exact contemporary Richard Brinsley Sheridan describes their intellectual and experimental rivalries.