TLRh | Making Breath Visible: A Medical Humanities Approach

Wednesday, 23 March 2022, 12:30am – 1:30pm 'Making Breath Visible:
A Medical Humanities Approach' a seminar by Professor Jane
MacNaughton (Durham) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities
Lunchtime Seminar Series in association with Trinity Long Room Hub.
The Trinity College Dublin Medical and Health Humanities Initiative
brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines
including history, philosophy, sociology, drama, health sciences,
religion, cultural studies, arts, literature and languages. Medical
and health humanities seeks to provide insights into the cultural
and social contexts within which diverse but interrelated concerns
such as the human condition, the individual experience of illness
and suffering, and the way medicine is (or was) practiced, might be
understood. ‘What can medical humanities do to make breathlessness
more visible and why is that important? As we (hopefully) start to
emerge from two years of a pandemic that has literally stollen life
and breath from millions around the world, I want to reflect upon a
project that came to an end just as the pandemic started. That
project, the Life of Breath, exemplifies a critical medical
humanities approach in that it was interdisciplinary, concerned
with lived experience, but also crucially, driven by a desire to
make a difference for those most affected by this devastating
symptom. I will reflect upon the invisibility of breathlessness in
relation to embodied experience, but also in the social and
political spheres, and explain how the medical humanities might
help to open out the understanding and knowledge of that
experience, and start to find ways of improving the lives of
breathless people.’ Bio Jane Macnaughton is Professor of Medical
Humanities at Durham University in the UK and Deputy Vice Provost
for Research. Until 2021 she was Director of the University’s
Institute for Medical Humanities (IMH). Jane has been centrally
involved in the development of medical humanities in the UK since
1998. She was part of the working group that set up the Association
for Medical Humanities in 2001, and she established the Northern
Network for Medical Humanities Research in 2013. Her own work
focusses on the idea of the embodied symptom and she has just
completed a five year project exploring the lived experience of
breathlessness. Jane was a member of the Wellcome Trust Expert
Review Group for established career awards in medical humanities
from 2010-2020. Jane is a qualified doctor and until recently did
sessional work as an Honorary Consultant in Obstetrics and
Gynaecology at the University Hospital of North Durham. The Trinity
College Dublin Medical and Health Humanities initiative seeks to
cultivate a richer understanding of the interactions and synergies
between practices and discourses of wellness, health or medicine
and the arts, humanities or culture through interdisciplinary
research and education. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/