Islay Shelbourne reports from the inaugural symposium of the newly established Medical Humanities Network at the University of St Andrews.
On January 20th 2025, scholars from across the University of St Andrews met for the University’s inaugural Medical Humanities Symposium. The Symposium, hosted by the St Andrews Medical Humanities Network in collaboration with the St Andrews Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Studies, sought to build upon the successful launch of the Network in May 2024 by bringing together academics from a range of disciplines and career stages to further cross-disciplinary collaborations and connections relating to the medical humanities. Eighteen scholars presented aspects of their research, representing nine schools across the University.
Despite this breadth of disciplinary backgrounds, several common themes emerged. Narratives, and particularly the act of challenging, shaping or introducing new narratives within discussions of disability, bodily experiences of illness, historical scientific practice, and fertility and women’s health, featured in papers across the Symposium’s four panels, as well as in the keynote delivered by Jaipreet Virdi.
The use of narratives also featured within the Symposium’s discussions of methodology. Speakers shared the successes and challenges of working across disciplinary divides, offering ways in which humanities approaches can enrich and inform STEM research, as well as how STEM-based quantitative methodologies can provide new insights and avenues for humanities and social science investigations.
Session 1: Exhibition, Narrative, Storytelling
Following opening remarks by co-organisers Morven Shearer and Richard Bellis (School of Medicine), Emily Hanson and Billy Rough (Art History) introduced their two-year public engagement project ‘Phenomenal Bodies: Exploring Disability in Scottish Academic Collections’. In a series of displays running concurrently at several Scottish partner institutions from June 2025, Hanson and Rough will encourage institutional partners and members of the public to reconsider the portrayal of bodily difference and disability within objects from each institution’s collections. Bridget Bradley (Anthropology) presented charcoal as a medium through which to explore themes of health and climate anxiety. Bradley highlighted how the study of charcoal’s hidden narratives – as artistic medium, energy resource, pollutant and medical treatment – can further interdisciplinary research on understandings of health during ecological crises.
Roxani Krystalli (International Relations) spoke on her and Philipp Schultz’s AHRC and DFG funded project on the role of love in the face of losses, including those borne from violence, sickness and ecological crisis. Krystalli suggested ways to research flourishing rather than just surviving in the face of illness, positing that an extension of what is considered a ‘good life’ beyond traditional concepts of living without suffering could change narratives of disability and health, and encourage the reimagining of recovery as a period of continual transformation rather than a fixed event with clearly delineated periods ‘before’ and ‘after’ illness. Concluding the session, Zoe McElhinney (Medicine) emphasised the value of composite narratives within medical education research, drawing on her recent work on the career pathways of GP academics. McElhinney presented the benefits of this reflective and creative approach, especially in representing the commonality of experiences among GP academics and using composites formed from multiple narratives to explore themes through stories rather than solely through quantitative data.
Session 2: Assessing Medical Research
Mattia Fumanti (Anthropology) opened Session 2 with a paper on Italian medical mobilities in the colonial world. Fumanti showed how Italian colonial physicians interacted within the paradox of colonial medicine (colonial biopolitical subjugation and harm versus the Hippocratic Oath’s requirement to heal and recognise the humanity of all patients), and how these and wider colonial interactions contributed to the making and remaking of Italian colonial subjectivities and intimacies. Joseph Millum (Philosophy) spoke on the outcomes of his multi-year work with the WHO on the benefits and methodological practicalities of integrating ethics into health research priority setting. Highlighting the disproportionate allocation of health research funding and challenges in resource allocation priority setting, Millum recommended decisions about funding research should be made according to ethical principles which consider the research’s optimised social value, assess risks (to both humans and non-human animals), ensure accountability and transparency, and respect special obligations of research funders.
Aileen Fyfe (History) shared findings from her current research on the role of journal editors in shaping research behaviour in the natural sciences and medicine, 1950-1980. In exploring the submission process for several British and North American journals, Fyfe charted the move towards standardisation among submission processes but noted that guidelines were largely related to physical presentation of articles in the early part of her study period, with guidelines from the 1970s shifting to focus on what constituted ‘good’, ethically approved research. In this way journal editors moved to judge the quality of the work which underpinned the paper, beyond just the final submitted article.
Jane Illes (Medicine) suggested the potential benefits of AI for the inclusion of Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) teaching within the UK medical school curriculum. Many medical curricula have very little SGBV content, and including this material is complicated by the curricula’s tight GMC regulations and the curriculum’s existing breadth. Illes posited that using generative AI to create sample SGBV curricula which are formatted in accordance with GMC guidelines, required learning outcomes and a Case Based Learning structure could provide forward momentum on the eventual inclusion of SGBV material in wider medical curricula.
Ted Bergman (Modern Languages) closed the panel with a paper on legal disputes related to medical competency at Early Modern Spanish Universities. He explained that 16th century Spanish medical schools appointed their Chairs of Medicine through student vote, however over time this system became corrupted by bribery, fraud, and violence. Through a study of lawsuits related to these appointments, Bergman highlighted the prestige associated with the Chair position, and the events which led to increased central control of university administration from the 17th century.
Session 3: Medical Humanities Methods
Sally Mubarak (Classics) opened Session 3 with an introduction to a new project with Alison Beach (History), which intends to use bioarchaeological and osteobiographic methods to reimagine medieval disability. Stemming from the AHRC Project Word of Mouth – Embodied Stories of Premodern Women at Work, this new project challenges narratives in history which write out or write off those with disabilities or impairments, instead using bioarchaeology and gait reconstruction to bridge the gap between physical evidence and lived experience of disability among medieval women. Katrin Metsis (Medicine) demonstrated the value of social scientific approaches within her research in the School of Medicine. Metsis highlighted the need to understand contextual factors which influence answers to survey questions and worked to combine both social science and medical review methods within her work on young people’s attitudes towards health.
Bettina Bildhauer (Modern Languages) highlighted the benefits of Medical Humanities perspectives for the new field of Critical Menstruation Studies. Responding to the current dominance of scientific approaches within the field, Bildhauer highlighted how a humanities approach, drawing on methods from literary studies, history and the social sciences, enriches studies of menstrual stigma and offers potential new avenues for future interdisciplinary research into menstruation and the menopause. Concluding the panel, Enrico Galvagni (Philosophy) clarified three categories of virtue-based bioethics and identified specific goals to improve future contributions for virtue-based bioethical studies. Galvani suggested the adoption of his proposed taxonomy of virtue-based bioethics approaches (being either to reconceptualize moral problems, to develop individuals’ virtues, or as a distinctive approach to policy making) could define criteria for successes in virtue-base bioethics as a field.
Session 4: Wellbeing Through Life
Starting the final session, Phillipa Woodcock (History) discussed the absence of miscarriage taboo in 17th century Scottish women’s letters. Woodcock charted the absence of taboo or euphemism in relation to miscarriage in letters sent between Katherine Hamilton, 1st Duchess of Athol and her circle, noting how discussions of miscarriage occurred regularly as part of larger networks of female community exchanges of knowledge and advice related to pregnancy and birth. Chia Liu (Geography and Sustainable Development)presented her research on old-age suicide in aging societies. Liu suggested that higher age specific suicide rates in countries including South Korea and Taiwan could be connected to unobserved cultural aspects of suicide, including lessened suicide taboo outside of Judeo-Christian influences, cumulative social disadvantages among aging populations, and the role of familial norms.
Sarah Bowers (Medicine) spoke on her experience integrating public advisors into her Wellcome funded project EMBED (Experiences of Multi-morbidity at End of Life). Bowers stressed the valuable insights gained from including a 6-member public advisory group within multiple aspects of her research, including data and ethics applications, qualitative protocols and public facing materials. This had meaningful impacts to her research, including in changing terminology related to end-of-life care and care giving. Mary Abed Al Ahad (Geography and Sustainable Development) concluded the final session with a paper on life satisfaction and air pollution. Using longitudinal individual level data on air pollution and life satisfaction from the UK, Abed Al Ahad found a correlation between higher concentration of air pollutants (NO2, SO2, PM10 and PM2.5) and lower life satisfaction as a result of poorer health. This represented an indirect impact of pollution through an individual’s health status which has been largely overlooked in existing literature.
Keynote: Beyond the Shot: The Complex History of Depo-Provera and Endometriosis
The Symposium’s four panels was followed by a highly anticipated keynote by Jaipreet Virdi (University of Delaware), titled ‘Beyond the Shot: The Complex History of Depo-Provera and Endometriosis’. Virdi’s keynote charted the development of Depo-Provera, an injectable synthetic progesterone, from its initial approved use for miscarriage and endometriosis in the 1960s, to its widespread prescription as a hormonal contraceptive. In doing so, she highlighted existing narratives associated with the drug, with the Global North’s narrative defined by the politics of drug regulation (particularly the safety and efficacy of long-term contraceptive use) contrasting the Global South’s narrative of population control, experimentation and of Depo-Provera acting as a tool of violence to some activists. A third narrative, overlooked in both cases, Virdi argued, was the early development of Depo-Provera as a treatment for endometriosis. In exploring this narrative, Virdi found connections between early endometriosis research and eugenic fears of race suicide due to the disease’s impact on the fertility of affluent white women. Research into hormones was motivated by these fears and resulted in the growth of oestrogen treatments and later concerns over oestrogen’s carcinogenic risks. Depo-Provera’s progesterone content was seen as a solution to this, however Virdi highlighted significant feminist activist pressure over Depo-Provera’s long-term safety as a contraceptive from the 1970s, even as similar networks did still endorse the drug for the treatment of endometriosis.
The multilayered history of Depo-Provera – which today faces significant litigation related to health impacts from long term use – provides rich ground for Virdi’s study and contributes to her wider research on the role of activism in endometriosis care and treatment, the impact of gender bias on endometriosis research, and the implications, for both patient and practitioner, of endometriosis’ status as an ‘invisible illness’.
Virdi’s keynote demonstrated the power of activists and non-academic partners in the development of knowledge surrounding endometriosis and Depo-Provera, echoing a number of earlier papers in which non-academic involvement represented a vital part of Network members’ early-stage research. The Network’s Inaugural Symposium successfully raised the profile of medical humanities at St Andrews and united researchers from across the university by their common research interests and methodologies. As the Network continues to develop, additional value will be found in extending its reach beyond the academy, drawing on the expertise of those academics already engaging with public advisors, advocacy groups, artists and activists to expand the Network’s footprint beyond St Andrews and facilitate further high-quality medical humanities research.
About the Author
Islay Shelbourne is a PhD candidate in Environmental History at the University of St Andrews. Her thesis investigates Southern Californian understandings of contagion during the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, examining how medical and civilian reactions to the pandemic were framed by the state’s unique attitudes towards health and nature.
