Fifth anniversary of CMH!
Some of the people that have been key in initiating, promoting, coordinating and directing medical humanities initiatives at Uppsala University. From the left: Solveig Jülich, Erika Sigvardsdotter, Anna Tunlid, Ylva Söderfeldt, Maria Björkman, Sven Widmalm and Francis Lee
On October 6, 2020, the Centre for Medical Humanities was inaugurated — a celebration with 50 participants, the maximum number allowed for gatherings during this phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic itself, a then ongoing and society-transforming process, further underscored the importance of understanding medicine and care as socially and culturally situated phenomena.
The aim of the Centre has been to initiate, develop, and promote research and educational collaborations within the field of medical humanities. We have pursued this through an interdisciplinary graduate school, by offering a research environment for early-career scholars working in the field, and by organizing an artist-in-residence programme — a way to involve artistic perspectives on medicine and health. We have also built a broad network of researchers from various disciplines, working with research and teaching in the borderlands between biomedicine and health, and the humanities and social sciences.
On October 14 at 16:00, we will celebrate our fifth anniversary together at Williams Pub, following Andrew Burchell’s seminar “Chronic Consumers: patient organisations, advertising, and the negotiation of consumption in twentieth-century Britain.”