Medical Humanities: New Frontiers or Back to the Past?
Medical Humanities: New Frontiers or Back to the Past?
Dr Ciara Breathnach, University of Limerick, Dr Natalie
Harrower, Digital Repository of Ireland and Professor Brendan Kelly, University
College Dublin.
On Thursday, March 6, a free, one-day symposium on Medical
Humanities in Ireland is being held at the Royal Irish Academy.
The aim of this one day symposium is to open dialogue
between clinicians, medical educators and humanists in order to advance debate
on the role of humanities in medical education.
The symposium is approved
for 6 CPD credits from RCPI and we would encourage physicians to consider
attending.
According to the Centre for Medical Humanities, ‘the Medical
Humanities is an emerging field of enquiry in which humanities and social
sciences perspectives are brought to bear upon an exploration of the human side
of medicine.’
The Wellcome Trust explains that there are many different
definitions of ‘medical humanities’ but that they embrace this ambiguity and take
a very broad view (including history of medicine as part of its remit).
It is an area that has been receiving more and more interest
in the past few years, with organisations such as Wellcome becoming
increasingly interested in funding medical humanities based research.
Please find more information about the symposium here.
Professor Brendan Kelly who is both an organiser and a presenter, and Professor Des O'Neill who is the respondent for a roundtable in the afternoon session, are both Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.
With sessions being led by these and other top scholars, it promises to be
an interesting and informative day.