Crisis in Health and Medicine

The European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) invites submissions for its biennial meeting, August 30 – 2 September 2023, which will take place in Oslo. The Association welcomes abstracts for individual papers, panels, roundtables and contributions to a mixed media session on the general theme Crisis in Medicine and Health.

At present, it seems that we are surrounded by an escalating series of crises, in which a new crisis begins before the last one is resolved. The global COVID-19 crisis unfolded in the midst of the climate change crisis, and has since been complicated by new military, economic, and political crises. The last decade has seen crises of war on all continents, followed by unprecedented refugee and displacement crises. Contrary to what is often assumed, crises are not rare, unexpected, or unknowable. Crises also arise on an individual level – a diagnosis of a life-threatening condition is a personal crisis, as well as a relational crisis. Neither are crises new to health and medicine. In the Hippocratic corpus, crises were seen as customary, but crucial, events in the disease process – determining the outcome in the form of recovery or death. Attending to crises has always involved value judgements. Indeed, the Greek root from which the word derives: κρίνειν (krinein) is a verb whose active form means “to choose, to decide a dispute, to discern, to judge.”

Pandemic crises, crises of war, or crises within health systems have been ongoing throughout history. Yet, not all forms of suffering are equally visible as crises, and declarations of crises are likely to have vastly different effects on those minoritized, racialized, and economically marginalized compared to those positioned at the mainstream of any given health system. Declaring crisis is a tool of power and control, giving a specific temporal shape to a set of events. That does not mean that there is no such thing as urgency, disruption, or acceleration, but naming it a crisis, is as much a question of bringing a situation about as responding to it. Crises, whether in systems, in societies or in the individual suffering of patients, are moments of decisive change, which invites us to reassess the different pasts of suffering and healing that we study. An examination of past crises can also help us reconsider the presents that we are in and the futures we envision.

We invite submissions on any topic in the history of medicine and health broadly conceived, and welcome a range of disciplinary approaches, time periods and geographical contexts. We especially encourage proposals that address aspects of the conference theme.

Topics

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The concept of crisis in early modern medicine, from Corpus Hippocraticum onwards conceived as a decisive moment in the disease process as well as the diagnostic process
• Crises and their temporal aspects – urgency, acceleration, delay, duration, synchronization, etc.
• Health and medicine in times of war (nurses and physicians during war time, but also people’s lives during these humanitarian crises, civilian and refugee health, etc.) and their afterlives (trauma, memories, scientific innovations)
• Humanitarian emergencies
• Pandemic and epidemic crises (lives lived during these crises, medical knowledge construction, measures taken, healing attempts) – and the afterlives of such crises
• Responses in health provision as “crisis services” (e.g., mental health services after a crisis)
• Economic crises and their wider consequences for health and medicine
• Environmental crises, climate crises, biodiversity crises and their relationship to health and healthcare and/or medical knowledge over time
• Crises in health as psychological, existential and relational events
• Crisis in trust (in research, in health systems, patient-physician relationships)
• Crises and faith
• Communication of crises
• Crisis of (post)modern medicine (overdiagnosis, overtreatment, but also historiographical and critical discussion of the thesis of (bio)medicalization (Illich, Szasz, Foucault, Clarke & co)
• Moral crises: integrity, objectivity and conflicts of interest in professional medicine
• Managing crisis: training, simulation and inter-professional collaboration
• High risk environments and historical planning for disaster
• Crises in (post)colonial medicine
• Shortages and waiting lists in healthcare over time
• Vulnerable populations and their (re)appearance at moments of crisis
• Rights, resilience and insuring against healthcare disasters
• Sensing disaster: sensory history and medical crises
• Collecting and documenting health crises; issues related to oral history and material culture collecting, including ethical questions
• Crises as a subject/an example in the teaching of medical history or in museum exhibitions
• Crises as an opportunity for community organizing and activism

We welcome individual paper, panel, roundtable, as well as poster and mixed media submissions until 1st of February 2023. Submissions that are explicitly inclusive and bring diversity to our discussions are particularly welcome.