Author: CHHS

The Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (University of Exeter), the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science (University of Bristol) in association with the Regional Medical Humanities network hosted a one-day networking event on ‘Research that impacts on public policy (medical humanities)’.

At a time when expertise is under increasing assault, we aimed to establish meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships between researchers, practitioners and policymakers, and opportunities for our research to have lasting, valuable impact on policy formation were explored.

Delegates’ time was spent looking at case studies, undertaking workshop activities and roundtable discussions, and sharing ideas for and experiences of influencing public policy through research.

Laura Salisbury, PI of the Wellcome-funded Waiting Times project based at the centre, and Victoria Bates (Centre for Health, Humanities and Science, University of Bristol) introduced the day and the key themes, and there were case study presentations by:

Havi Carel, Life of Breath
Lorraine Hansford, DeStress Project
Jen Groveand Rebecca Langlands, Sex & History Project
Kate Massey-Chase(Exeter)
Katie Beswick(Exeter)
Maria Vaccarella(Bristol)
Fred Cooper (Exeter)
Arthur Rose (Bristol)

Our keynote presentation was an interactive session exploring the innovative, publicly engaged work of the PARC Project, with Nik Brown and Chrissy Buse.

Travel bursaries were made available for postgraduate researchers.

On May 22nd we were joined by Professor Gareth Williams, who discussed his new book ‘Unravelling the Double Helix: the Lost Heroes of DNA’ with Sir Mark Walport, FRS.

DNA. The double helix; the blueprint of life; and, during the early 1950s, a baffling enigma that could win a Nobel Prize.

Everyone knows that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix. In fact, they clicked into place the last piece of a huge jigsaw puzzle that other researchers had assembled over decades.

In this talk, drawing on material from his book, Professor Gareth Williams told the story of that discovery in the round, highlighting some of its lost heroes, from those who first fought to prove that DNA was the stuff of genes, to later researchers like Maurice Wilkins (the ‘Third Man of DNA’) and Rosalind Franklin, famously demonised by Watson.

Discussing and unpacking this story with him was Sir Mark Walport, FRS, Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation, and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government (2013–17) and Director of the Wellcome Trust (2003—13).

About the book: ‘This is a FANTASTIC book – the deep story of the discovery of DNA, starting in 1868, with a German doctor finding a new molecule contained in the nuclei of white blood cells… 5 chapters in, and this is already clamouring to be one of my fave science/history books of 2019′ — Professor Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at University of Birmingham. ‘Truly Superb’, Matt Ridley, The Times.

On 13th May the CHHS was joined by Dr Anna Luise Kirkengen who presented a talk on the lived experience of violation during childhood and adolescence, reported by two women, as the vantage point for exploring the relationship between their experience and their health. The violation histories of these women, as related by the persons, was juxtaposed to their sickness histories, as documented in their medical records. This approach allowed for a comparison between biomedical and biographical accounts of serious disease development.

Kirkengen argued that when applying a framework of the phenomenological notion of the lived body, including the details of embodied integrity violation, on the biomedical presentation and documentation of the diseased body, a striking discrepancy becomes apparent. This particular kind of “gap”, not primarily in terms of valid knowledge but in terms of appropriate understanding, represents a source for medical wrongdoing, eventually resulting in an involuntary yet salient contribution to chronification and disability. Such a result calls for integrating a phenomenological understanding and terminology with the biomedical to render the lived body comprehensible for health professionals.

Contact: Dr Anna Luise Kirkengen – anna.l.kirkengen@ntnu.no

In April the Centre for Health,  Humanities and Science hosted a joint research seminar with the History Department at the University of Bristol. We were joined by Professor Brian Ward who spoke on ‘Sex, Drugs and Country Music: Loretta Lynn and the Health Environment in Mid-20th Century Kentucky’.

Born in Kentucky in 1932, Loretta Lynn is one of post-World War Two country music’s biggest female stars, boasting a slew of hit records and awards, and three best-selling autobiographies, one of which (Coal Miner’s Daughter) spawned a successful, Oscar-winning feature film. Although critics have long applauded Lynn for her realistic depictions of female rural working-class life, few have paid attention to how much her art and life-story have to tell us about the changing health environment in rural Kentucky in the mid-to-late 20th Century.

Ward’s talk explored how Lynn’s personal experience of many of the most pressing health concerns in her home state, including ‘black lung’ (coal workers’ pneumoconiosis), TB, congenital colour blindness, stroke, and mental illness, informed her songs and life-writings. In particular, the talk focused on how her songs and life-writings provide intimate, sometimes unusually candid, personal insights into issues surrounding women’s reproductive health, sex education and the domestic consequences of alcoholism, and maps them against important changes in health care policies and practices, and the development of medical knowledge, in Kentucky and the broader US during the mid-20th Century.

Contact: Brian Ward

Members of the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science were joined by Dr Arthur Rose on 13/02/19 who spoke on ‘Transhistorical approaches to Breath in Literature’.

Rose noted that breathing is an autonomic function essential to life. As we attend to it, so its significance seems to magnify. But, when our breath does not demand our attention, we barely register it. It remains a background murmur to our lives, as we pursue other things. For this paper, he considered how returning to the breath, as a formal conceit, patterns a relationship between literature and the body. Since this relationship recurs as a point of concern for literary thinkers, from Chaucer to Rushdie, it serves, in turn, as the basis for a transhistorical comparison of breath’s meaning. Drawing on Reading Breath in Literature, a collection of essays he edited with Stefanie Heine, Peter Garratt, Naya Tsentourou and Corinne Saunders, Rose presented brief vignettes of his, and colleagues’, insights into breath as it appears in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Lee, Kerouac and Rushdie, before suggesting ways in which these several approaches might be useful for future work.

The book may be found here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7

Contact: Arthur Rose – arthur.rose@bristol.ac.uk

We were joined by Dr Robert Chapman on 05/12/18, who gave a talk on ‘The Reality of Autism: Beyond the Biomedical Paradigm’.

Professor Mark Paterson ran an afternoon workshop on ‘Haptic methodologies and multisensory mediations’ in room G.16 of Cotham House on 15/05/18.

Mark is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He has conducted funded research on the use of haptic technologies within museums, and on the mixed spaces of human-robotic interaction (HRI). He is the author of several books, including The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (2007), Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (2016) and co-editor of Touching Place, Spacing Touch (with Martin Dodge, 2012). He is co-editor of a special issue of the journal New Media & Society on ‘Haptic Media Studies’ (2017). His current book project is How We Became Sensory- Motor: Mapping Movement and Modernity.

This workshop focussed on on the emergence of ‘multimodal analysis’ – which brings together the textual, visual, aural, embodied and spatial dimensions – and their potential value for scholars across the humanities & social sciences. It raised questions such as: what can scholars of the senses, and those engaging in the ‘multimodal turn’ in research, learn from each another? How can ‘haptic’ or relativistic ‘embodied’ methodologies make use of more distributed and accessible multimodal media? How does the archive incorporate such multisensory mediations, and what limits are there in interpretation? Is there an irresolvable tension between relativistic approaches to sensory practice and forms of research and dissemination that engage the audio-visual affordances of contemporary media? What might this all mean for the interdisciplinary endeavour that has become known as ‘sensory studies’? Finally, do the possibilities of multimodal (e.g. audio-visual) media foster more creative attitudes to data collection, and what would this look like for different humanities and social science fields?

Contact: Mark Paterson – paterson@pitt.edu

The University of Bristol’s Life of Breath Project, The Centre for Black Humanities, and The Centre for Health, Humanities and Science were delighted to welcome Professor Lundy Braun for a public lecture on “Race Correction” in Medicine: A History of Lung Function Measurements.

Lung function measurements are routinely “corrected” for race and/or ethnicity transnationally. This talk drew upon the historical and scientific literature on lung function measurements to examine how philosophical ideas of racial difference in lung function in the US became scientific; how race intersected with social class and gender; and how ideas of innate difference gained sufficient traction, such that they persist to the present day with little contestation.

Lundy Braun is a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies at Brown University (USA) and author of Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

After her lecture, Lundy Braun was joined by historians Dr Michael Bresalier (University of Swansea) and Dr Coreen McGuire (University of Bristol) for a panel discussion and audience Q&A, followed by reception with wine and light buffet.

Contact: Lundy Braun– Lundy_Braun@brown.edu

Contact: Coreen McGuire – c.mcguire@bristol.ac.uk

A Regional Networking event was held on 28/03/18 in the Victoria Rooms, Bristol. During the day there were opportunities to discuss shared research interests, engage in interactive workshops and forge new relationships. There were also talks given by Professor Havi Carel and Professor Laura Salisbury.

The event was hosted by the Bristol Centre for Health, Humanities and Science and the Exeter Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, in association with the Regional Medical Humanities Network.

The Regional Networking event sought to respond to the training and development needs of our delegates. In order to do this, we asked all attendees to reply to the following question: ‘What is one challenge that you currently face in your work?’ prior to the event. The myriad answers we received were collated, and the event programme was directly informed by the common themes identified.

We welcomed over sixty attendees from across the South West and Wales. Assistance was made available to help with the costs of travel; and priority was given to Postgraduate Research Students and those travelling from Exeter.

For our first CHHS meeting on 06/12/18 we were joined by Dr Giovanni Biglino (Lecturer in Cardiovascular Bioinformatics & Medical Statistics, School of Clinical Sciences) and artist Sofie Layton, who has extensive experience of participatory arts practice in a medical context. They presented on the pioneering The Heart of the Matterproject. Attendees then had the opportunity to discuss the interplay of arts, humanities, and biomedical sciences, as well as the presence of literal and figurative hearts in their work.

Contact: Giovanni Biglino– g.biglino@bristol.ac.uk

Sofie Layton