Paige Donaghy reports from the symposium ‘Looking at Bodies, Sex and Gender in the Health and Medical Humanities’ (Australian National University, Australia).
From the 5th to 6th June, 2024, researchers gathered at the Australian National University (ANU) in frosty Canberra for a symposium on the medical and health humanities. The symposium was the second one organised by the ANU Health Humanities Network, led by Katie Sutton, Keren Hammerschlag and Claire Hansen, and funded by the Research School of the Humanities and Arts at the ANU. This event brought together medical and health humanities researchers from across Australia and beyond to reflect on current research being undertaken in Australia, as well as the potential future directions for the field. The esteemed Ludmilla Jordanova was visiting ANU and provided the symposium’s keynote address, as well as running a masterclass for early career researchers the following day.
Day 1: Current and Future Research in Australian Health and Medical Humanities
The symposium kicked off with a series of “lightning talks”, which featured a range of interdisciplinary research, from art history, cultural studies, history and linguistics. Bianca Williams, for instance, spoke about “pregnant belly casting”, a practice involving the creation of plaster moulds of the pregnant torso, and how this art has been used by First Nations women across Australia. Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt discussed the issue of “menstruation leave” (paid leave from work due to menstruation) in labour law, employment policy, and feminist activism, emphasising that for women in the Global South, this issue was inordinately more complex than in the North. Mary Dahm ended this session by recapping her current project exploring communications of diagnostic uncertainty by physicians in emergency departments in Canberra, with the aim of identifying how physicians, patients and other parties respond to expressions of uncertainty. Following the lightning talks, there was a panel which analysed new interdisciplinary research into different aspects of the ‘body’. This included three presentations: a history of ‘Pink Viagra’ by Jacinthe Flore, an analysis of chronic fatigue and queer kinship in contemporary literature by Chloe Green, and a ‘provocation’ on the idea of re-embodiment in disability and illness studies by Jo Winning.
After lunch, the remainder of the day was dedicated to a roundtable addressing the current opportunities and challenges in the health and medical humanities in Australia. The panel featured key researchers and organisers of the medical humanities, including Bronwyn Parry, Birgit Lang, Elizabeth Stephens (founder of the Australasian Health and Medical Humanities Network) and Karin Sellberg. During the panel, key themes emerged, including the challenge of bringing medical and health professionals and researchers into humanities collaborations, such as research projects. For instance, Sellberg spoke about their teaching program which involved collaboration with the Integrated Pathology Learning Centre (an anatomy lab) to create medical humanities events with humanities and medical undergraduate students. Sellberg noted that it was sometimes difficult to create truly interdisciplinary events, as medical students were not often taught about the value of humanities thinking, or were not encouraged to attend such events. The panel also highlighted some positives that they identified in the medical humanities research being undertaken in Australia. Stephens spoke about the strength of interdisciplinary medical humanities work that has appeared in the past few years.
Keynote Address: Ludmilla Jordanova
The first day ended with a keynote address by Ludmilla Jordanova, entitled “Historians, Bodies and Visual Culture”. Jordanova began her talk by showing us a photograph of a man with a wide smile and brown curly hair, before asking the audience if we knew who it was. The person pictured was the extraordinary British historian, Roy Sydney Porter (1946-2002), who worked at Cambridge before moving to the Wellcome Institute in 1979. Jordanova started her presentation with this image of Porter to elucidate the central themes of the keynote, which included: the importance of understanding the origins and contexts of historians and their work; and a call for historians to embrace true interdisciplinarity and explicitness in their research aims, commitments, and arguments.
To this first issue, Jordanova recapped the life and career of Porter, who had been her mentor at Cambridge. Jordanova traced the ways in which he shaped the field of medical history. Porter’s work was grounded in the radical social history that emerged at Cambridge in the mid-twentieth century, and his interests spanned science, the visual, urban space, psychiatry and sexuality. Jordanova suggested that Porter’s groundbreaking work made many areas of research ‘possible’, that would previously have not been thinkable, due to the ‘sensibilities’ of the historical discipline in the mid to late twentieth century. That current sub-fields in the history of sexuality exist, for instance, is a testament to Porter’s previous path breaking.
Importantly, Jordanova noted how Porter’s work was inherently interdisciplinary, before the concept had become vogue. Porter was particularly fond of using art historical methods and visual culture in his research, clear in monographs such as Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (2001). Jordanova reflected that it was Porter’s research on visual culture that spurred her own historical interests, and much of her career, in this field. It was Porter who first encouraged her to consider medical images, specifically the eighteenth-century obstetrical atlas of Scottish surgeon William Hunter, for an edited volume. By tracing Porter’s legacy, Jordanova contended that Porter’s work was an excellent example of how to incorporate the visual, but also, how historians should and could be ‘explicit’ about their historical methods and agenda.
This led to the second main element of the keynote, which was Jordanova’s discussion of the importance of historians being “historical about the ways in which they work, and about how their contexts shape their ideas, commitments, and writings”. For Jordanova, this means attending to the specific political, social, cultural issues that shaped how historians thought and wrote about the subjects they studied. This, in turn, shapes how historians “see” the visual cultures that they analyse, such as the portraits that Jordanova is currently working on. During this discussion, Jordanova provided the audience with a case study of a historian that did this successfully. The work of British art historian Michael Braxandall, whose 1972 monograph Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), was a premier example of blending art, art history and contextualisation of one’s aims and arguments to present a synthesized historical account. The emphasis on the importance of these themes was continued in the following day of the symposium, when a workshop on visual culture for research students and early career researchers took place.
Day 2: Borderline Images and How to Use Them: A Visual Medical Humanities Masterclass
The following day, the postgraduate and early career research contingent of the symposium met to participate in a masterclass on medical humanities images. Alongside this panel, senior researchers met for a ‘Teaching and Learning’ day of the symposium.
The early career event was organised by Keren Hammerschlag, who assisted Jordanova in delivering a fantastic workshop on the subject of “borderline” images, things that sat at the borders of topics, ideas, or disciplines. The participants came from a wide variety of backgrounds, such as queer studies, history and sociology, disability studies, while others were practicing artists and designers. To get us thinking about ‘borderlines’, Jordanova summarised some critical points and approaches from her keynote, but also her book The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (2012). Concepts from this work, such as the need to “activate” visual culture through thick description, and then analysis, as well as the notion of “visual intelligence”, were useful frameworks through which participants then contributed to the workshop.
Each participant had selected two ‘borderline’ images for discussion, and these were introduced for a few minutes by the participants, which was followed by a group discussion and Q&A. For example, I had selected two anatomical images of the placenta, from my own research into early modern medicine, which we then as a group analysed in terms of Jordanova’s frameworks. Other examples of images discussed included artist Harriet Schwarzrock’s presentation of her glass blown “plasma illuminations”, as well as Michelle Bootcov’s analysis of the changing visualisations of viral hepatitis. Key themes that emerged from the presentations, and the subsequent group discussions, was the need to attend to the ‘conditions of existence’ of images. Jordanova also emphasized the need to avoid homogenizing the ways in which historical actors saw images—every person in the past, regardless of cultural norms, saw, felt and responded to images in distinctive ways.
One of the phrases that continues to bounce around in my mind following this event is Jordanova’s discussion of “going horizontal” in research. By this, Jordanova meant the practice of moving laterally across disciplines to best analyse visual culture, whether that be the use of art history, or the history of the book. However, Jordanova also suggested that these horizontal moves should be used to go between images and discourse in the period under analysis.
Ending the symposium after an intellectually energizing day, the participants agreed that the workshop had been deeply beneficial for their research, but also to think in more interdisciplinary ways about the visual cultures they studied. In the broader context of the preceding day’s discussion of the future of health and medical humanities, it was clear from the innovative and striking projects being completed by research students and early careerists that the future is very bright in Australasia indeed.
For a review of the first symposium by the ANU Health Humanities Network, please see this review by Rebecca Blake.
About the Author
Paige Donaghy is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne, where she is researching obstetric medicine, gender and emotions in early modern Europe. She is an award-winning historian who has published widely on sexuality, gender and reproductive medicine in the Social History of Medicine and Isis.
