Research
at the Institute
Research at the Institute spans the History of Medicine
in its nascent stages through to pressing contemporary debates in Medical Ethics.
The following list, while not exhaustive, offers a snapshot of the diversity of
research interests at the Institute for Medical Humanities:
- cultures and philosophies of medicine:
shifting conceptualisations of health and illness vis-à-vis the rise of
‘personalised’ medicine (longue durée); epistemology of medical uncertainty and
its consequences for medical practice (20th – 21st century); medical
fallibility (longue durée); medical aesthetics from the ancient world to the early
modern era; anatomy and practices of dissection from a historical and
epistemological perspective; the cultural history of blood; the cultural
history of the hand; norm and deviance in medical and anthropological
conceptualisations of the body and human typologies in the 16th and
17th century; medicine and humanism; medieval theories of medicine;
bioethical and biopolitical dimensions of medical theories
- multiculturalism and globalisation:
culturally
and religiously inflected conceptions of health, illness, the
doctor-patient-relationship and end of life debates; the genesis and production
of medical ethics in the context of culture; culturally specific and gender
sensitive counselling in the clinic; research ethics in a globalised world, with
particular concentration on the Global South; the ethical dimensions of medical
research with ethnic minorities and indigenous communities; contemporary traces
of biological race concepts in genetics and biomedicine
- medical ethics:
autonomy and dependency at
the end of life; gender and care; the relation between history and ethics from
a normative perspective; the ethics and history of assisted suicide (19th
– 21th century); patient participation, digitalisation and health
data; research ethics
- the history of psychiatry:
the development
and institutionalisation of criminal anthropology in the 19th and 20th
century; the rise and professionalization of psychiatry in the 19th
and 20th century
- patient narratives and narratives of
illness
- the production and practices of evidence
in medicine
