The Social Life of Medical Anecdotes

Recorded November 7th, 2024. A hybrid seminar by Dr Brian Hurwitz
(Emeritus Professor of Medicine and the Arts at the Centre for the
Humanities and Health, King’s College London) as part of the
Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series. Abstract: Medicine is
strewn with anecdotes, brief, pointed accounts of human episodes,
drawn from scattered zones of healthcare
experience. Traditionally viewed as a short form medical
discourse which encompasses case reports, aphorisms, witticisms and
hybridised versions of such texts and utterances, some are artfully
fashioned micro-narratives, others ‘twitchily alive’ observations
and dialogues. Frequently dismissed as epistemologically doubtful
if not misleading frippery, he approaches anecdotes and the
medically anecdotal as vernacular patient practices which support
descriptive and moral insights into the sociality and power
relations of medicine. An ‘unauthorised’, unregulated idiom, which
does not seek to isolate events and experiences from subjective
thoughts and feelings about them, anecdotes express a standpoint
epistemology that articulates healthcare circumstances in new
light. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/