Phillips’s talk, “New Frontiers in Neurohumanities: An fMRI Study of Literary Attention and Jane Austen,” discusses new work in cognitive approaches to literature, the neuroscience of narrative and the history of mind. Its focus is on a unique cross-disciplinary experiment that teamed scholars in the humanities, radiology, and neuroscience to explore the evolving neural networks involved in attention and reading in the brain. The study used tools from neuroscience, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eye tracking, to explore the cognitive dynamics involved in reading a literary work with different levels of attention. Using fMRI, her team analyzed complex changes in brain activity as doctoral students in literature read a chapter of Mansfield Park with two styles of attention: close reading (or, literary analysis) and pleasure reading. The study’s surprising early results suggest that such re-focusing in reading is far from subtle. Scans demonstrate dramatic and unexpected increases in blood flow to regions of the brain far beyond those responsible for “executive functions,” suggesting that how we read may be as important as what we read. Linking this fMRI study of attention and Phillips’s research on the literary history of distraction, the work suggests that research crossing the supposedly “unbridgeable divide” between humanities and sciences is in fact central to advancing our understanding of mind and brain. Phillips also proposes that understanding attention’s history is crucial, arguing that a series of key debates over focus that continue to shape modern neuroscientific studies have roots that can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Finally, and most importantly, she suggests that advancing narrative neuroscience will involve a still-closer alliance among literary scholars, creative writers, artists, and scientists, working to provide a real-time view of the brain as we engage with complex works of literature, music, or art.
Conference Sessions
ONLY SHOW ME: Wednesday Feb.26 | Thursday Feb.27 | Friday Feb.28
Join us for the “Theory and Wellness” presentation which features University of Arizona faculty from multiple disciplines as they explore three theoretical approaches to health. Panelists will discuss topics such as “Bodies of Evidence” and “Politics of Environmental Health”, and “Unsettled Conceptions of Heart Health.” This panel addresses a critique on the current medical approach of placing patients into categories of identity (e.g., women, African American, the elderly), and how re-thinking this categorization can offer a new way of understanding how people become sick. Also, it will investigate environmental remediation and how this strategy has implications for both our health and environment. Lastly, end-of-life decisions will be examined and how they are complicated both practically and ethically by the use of implanted medical devices such as pacemakers and artificial hearts.
• Bodies of Evidence: Locating the Missing Body in Health Disparities Research | Monica Casper
Health disparities research is a growth field, with interest from scholars in public health, sociology, psychology, anthropology, medicine, urban studies, and more. The work enables us to measure and track relationships between social inequality and health status, and resulting data can be useful for policymakers, clinicians, and health advocates. And yet, despite the locus of health and illness in the body, bodies and embodiment are seldom theorized—much less present—in health disparity studies. Too often, people are reduced to categories of identity (e.g., women, African American, the elderly, the poor), in ways that elide the complexities of embodiment and its varied structural locations. I explore the ways that bringing the body into health disparities research can reshape what we know about inequality and health. I suggest that embodying health disparities research offers a different interpretive angle on why and how people become sick and die. At the same time, and perhaps more radically, theorizing the body/embodiment within health disparities research has the potential to change how unequal lives and deaths are conceptualized and addressed.
• Remediation: Pharmikons and the Politics of Environmental Health | Lee Medovoi
This talk investigates the highly ambiguous phenomenon of environmental remediation, which has become a key corporate strategy for managing the implications of damage to both populations and environments. Using Jacques Derrida’s reading of the Pharmikon, as well as Richard Grusin and Jay Bolton’s media studies analysis of “remediation,” I suggest that, especially in the Global South, there is a toxifying as well as a curative thrust to promises of “environmental remediation” that deserves consideration in the field of ecocriticism. To elaborate on the significance of this analysis for contemporary literary studies, I discuss the representation of petro-violence and environmental damage in Halon Habila's novel Oil on Water.
• Unsettled Conceptions of Heart Health: Implanted Medical Devices and Treatment Decisions at the End of Life | Michael Gill
It is becoming increasingly common to treat heart disease by surgically implanting durable circulatory support devices, such as pacemakers, implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, left ventricular assist devices, and total artificial hearts. These devices have produced the obvious great benefit of prolonging the lives of patients. But they have also raised a new question about end-of-life care: if competent patients request that physicians participate in the deactivation of these devices, should physicians always comply? Several studies have revealed that patients and physicians have unsettled attitudes towards this question. This unsettledness contrasts with attitudes toward the cessation of other life-prolonging treatments. There is virtually no controversy nowadays about the legitimacy of physician participation in the discontinuation of artificial nutrition and hydration or the use of a ventilator, virtually no questioning of a competent patient’s right for physician care upon the termination of dialysis or chemotherapy. What explains the comparatively unsettled attitudes toward implanted circulatory devices? I explore this question and try to show that it arises because of changes new medical technologies have wrought on our conceptions of health and treatment.
Media and Health examines theories regarding the media and its role in health. The Lived Life explores the changing literary depictions of a multi-causational disease in Russian literature: alcoholism. This lecture will demonstrate how the literature on alcoholism is a focal point for growing concerns about issues such as gender roles and the increase in social and domestic violence in contemporary Russian culture. How the media can frame our body images is a question posed, detailing two theories regarding the media’s role in health: a framing and an objectification theory. Lastly, Sympathetic Pathologies critiques the ways in which scientific advances shape culture and the questions posed in the media. Bipolar Disorder and PTSD will examine how mental illness as an extreme state of consciousness is portrayed through the lens of Showtime’s popular television program Homeland (2011).
• The Lived Life: Russian Woman Writing Alcoholism | Teresa Polowy
I will explore changing literary depictions of alcoholism in Russian literature as a focal point for growing concerns about such issues as gender roles and relations and the increase in social and domestic violence in contemporary Russian culture. The 1980s (re)emergence of women’s literature in Russia was notable for its attention to women’s everyday lived experiences: in this viable literary voice, taboo topics including the effects of alcoholism, acquired greater openness. In their frank treatment of this and other social themes, especially including the dynamics of interpersonal and familial relations, and in their refusal to not offer pat solutions to such complex issues, women writers in Russia contribute substantially to unmasking the violence of everyday life. The nature of my paper is interdisciplinary and predicated on the reciprocal interplay of literary, cultural, and social science insights; it takes as a fundamental starting point Jane Lilienfeld’s position that alcoholism is a “biopsychosocial illness” and a “multicausational disease” with a “physiological component.” (Reading Alcoholisms,1999:4). This paper will focus on stories by Russian women that acknowledge the problem of female alcoholism with the expectation that they will supplement the relative dearth of sociological and psychological data about heavy drinking by Russian women.
• Health Versus Appearance: A Content Analysis Investigating Frames of Health Advice in Women's Health Magazines | Jennifer Aubrey and Rachel Hahn
The goal of the present study was to investigate the framing of health advice in the articles of women’s health magazines. Specifically, we examined the extent to which health magazines advise women to adopt healthy behaviors in order to look good (appearance frame) versus in order to feel good (health frame).
A content analysis of five years of the six highest-circulating women’s health magazines revealed a higher frequency of health frames (32.6%) than appearance frames (24.8%) overall, but when beauty/health hybrid magazines (e.g., Shape and Self) were examined separately, appearance frames (32.8%) outnumbered health frames (26.5%). In addition, despite the magazines’ focus on health, the most frequent category of products advertised was for appearance-enhancing products (43.7%). Finally, appearance-framed articles were significantly more likely to visually depict women with a high degree of skin exposure (43.2%) than health-framed articles (17.4%), and appearance-framed articles were more likely to feature corresponding images that objectified women (34.8%) than health-framed articles (21.3%). We discuss the results in light of framing theory and objectification theory.
• Bipolar Disorder and PTSD: Sympathetic Pathologies in Showtime's Homeland | Scott Selisker
Approaching the medical humanities from the perspective of literary study, my research traces the ways in which scientific advances have shaped (and continue to shape) U.S. culture and the kinds of questions posed by literature and popular film and television. In this talk, I will discuss how Showtime’s popular television program Homeland (2011–)—like a great many U.S. literary and cinematic works about terrorism since 2001—makes implicit comparisons between religious fanaticism and diagnosable mental illness. Homeland’s protagonist Carrie Mathison struggles with bipolar disorder that mirrors the irrational streak and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of the suspected terrorist Nicholas Brody. Departing radically from the anti-psychiatry literature that dates from the 1960s, Homeland and newer literary works on terrorism call on the expertise of psychiatry and other scientific disciplines to explain, and to help us to approach, the extreme states of consciousness that we associate with fundamentalist terrorism. With reference to work by Ian Hacking, Priscilla Wald, and Susan Sontag, I suggest that Homeland employs bipolar disorder and PTSD as pathologies in order to encourage- rather than the pathologization of the terrorist’s unthinkable thoughts- a broader horizon of sympathy and understanding.
Join us for the “Historical Approaches to Health and Wellness” presentation which features UA faculty from a variety of Departments including Spanish and Portuguese, East Asian Studies, German Studies, French and Italian, and English. This session will detail some of the historical approaches to health and wellness. Beginning in Medieval Japan, “The Metaphysics of Tea” presented by Albert Welter, Ph.D., will explore the rationale for promoting tea drinking for spiritual and physical health. This talk will promote the idea that through tea drinking the notions of health and spirituality are intertwined. Albrecht Classen, Ph.D., will discuss “Medieval Mysticism” as it relates to current approaches used today in alternative medicine. “Poetry Argues with the Razor,” as presented by Fabian Alfie, Ph.D., bridges literary history and the history of medicine by elucidating on Burchiello’s poems from the thirteenth century. Lastly, Thomas Willard, Ph.D., will present “Medical Uses of Imagery” and will suggest why imagination proved so important in the history of medicine using writings from Parecelsus.
• The Metaphysics of Tea: Health and Spirituality in Medieval Japan | Albert Welter
The Japanese monk Eisai (1141-1215) is renowned for introducing Zen Buddhism to Japan, but the legacy of his written works reveals multifaceted interests, notably the political and social (in addition to religious) dimensions of Zen institutional practice. One of his surviving works, theKissa yōjō-ki 喫茶養生記 (Treatise on Drinking Tea and Nourishing Life), is a monograph on the health benefits and spiritual advantages of drinking tea, a beverage that he introduced, like Zen, upon his return from China in 1187. My presentation explores the rationale Eisai employs for the promotion of tea drinking, combining Chinese metaphysics with esoteric Buddhist spirituality, which combined are believed to provide the conditions for sound physical health and spiritual wellbeing. At root, my exploration suggests that notions of health and spirituality are intertwined, and conditioned by the cultural horizon––the thought, beliefs, and world-view––of engaged participants.
• Mystical Visions and Spiritual Health: Medieval Mysticism as a Platform for the Exploration of Human Spirituality and Physical Health | Albrecht Classen
My paper will examine what medieval mystics had to say about their bodily experiences which often signaled a spiritual language. Illness was commonly identified as a reflection of the mystic’s unwillingness to share her experience with her audience, and physical suffering was regarded as an instrument to reach higher levels of spirituality. By the same token, for many mystics the maltreatment of the body or the suffering from physical illness served as a means for higher ends, freeing the soul from the bodily prison so that the encounter with the Godhead became possible. Some mystics deliberately tortured their own bodies to experience pain comparable to that suffered by Christ, and shedding blood was a sign of spiritual honor. But all mystics reached a higher level of awareness through their visions and revelations. I will discuss the complex of physical illness and suffering in the context of mystical experiences and will attempt to draw meaningful connections to approaches pursued today in alternative medicine.
• Poetry Argues with the Razor: Burchiello (ca. 1404-1449), the Poet-Barber | Fabian Alfie
Domenico di Giovanni, nicknamed il Burchiello, occupies an unusual place in Italian literature. The author of approximately 200 sonnets, he dominated Italian poetry in the early fifteenth century, and was put in the same category as Dante and Petrarch. Yet Burchiello’s verse is not accessible; on the contrary, he excelled at nonsensical poetry, a motif that dominates the majority of his poems. Other poems are satiric, deriding politicians, clerics, merchants, and individuals. Interestingly, Burchiello was a barber, a medical practitioner that performed minor procedures such as applying enemas, lancing boils, preparing salves and setting fractures. In my paper, I will discuss how Burchiello’s poetry at times reflects his experiences as a barber. A number of poems deal with his life as a medical practitioner. He writes about his illnesses in great detail, including a pair of distasteful sonnets about constipation and diarrhea. He also writes numerous poems consisting of fictitious—nonsensical—prescriptions. Astrology was also considered at the time to be a physical science with medical applications. Intriguingly, Burchiello treats astrological themes in a number of poems, indicating his training in astrology as well. My paper will bridge between literary history and the history of medicine, as both fields are necessary to make sense of Burchiello’s medical verse.
• Medical Uses of Imagery: Imagination and Health in Paracelsus (1493-1541) | Thomas Willard
There has been growing emphasis on the medical uses of imagery, and especially the related concepts of visualization and imagination. Images have always figured in traditional healing, whether by shamaans or curanderas, priests of Asclepius or the Tao. However, the role of imagination—the image-making power—in the medical arts has perhaps never been so fully explored as in the late thought of Paracelsus. This illustrated talk suggests why imagination proved so important to his thinking about the causes and treatments of disease and the prolongation of life. It also gives specifics from his writings on diseases of various sorts, physical, mental, and what would now be called psychosomatic.
Join us for the “Traditional Healing and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century” panel which features University of Arizona experts from multiple departments such as American Indian Studies, Mexican American Studies, Family and Community Medicine, Anthropology and the Center of Excellence in Women’s Health. Panelists will review traditional healing and spiritual practices implemented in the twenty-first century. Presenter Patrisia Gonzales, Ph.D., addresses the natural world and laws in Indigenous healing as primary relationships that create medicine. “Whole Person Outcomes beyond Pain Relief,” presented by Cheryl Ritenbaugh, Ph.D., MPH, Emery R. Eaves, and Allison Hopkins, Ph.D., examines a clinical trial on Traditional Chinese Medicine and the study outcomes that go beyond pain reduction. The final presentation by Gila Silverman, MPH, deals with ritual prayer among liberal American Jews, and explores how the power of prayer escapes clinical narratives and provides a feeling of connection to community, ancestors and traditions.
• "L.A.W.S.": The Four Elements as Primary Medicine in Indigenous Healing Systems—Land, Air, Water, Sun | Patrisia Conzales
Dr. Gonzales' presentation will address the natural world and natural laws in Indigenous healing ways as primary relationships that create medicine.
• Whole Person Outcomes Beyond Pain Relief: A Clinical Trial of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for Temporomandibular Disorders (TMD) | Cheryl Ritenbaugh, Emery Eaves, and Allison Hopkins
This presentation explores outcomes beyond pain reduction among participants in an NIH-funded trial of TCM for participants with TMD. The 20-visit TCM protocol included individualized acupuncture, herbs, tuina, and lifestyle recommendations. Participants reported on quantitative outcomes including changes in how pain was perceived, awareness, control, meaning, sleep, joyfulness, hope, and empowerment, and participated in qualitative interviews 4-5 times. We utilized a mixed methods data analytic approach, combining phenomenological with quantitative analysis. Many participants perceived non-pain outcomes to be most important, reporting changes in: sense of control over illness; perceptions of pain; ability to manage pain on their own; increased hope for the future; better ability to handle stress; not holding things in; and improved overall health and well-being. Many participants reported being able to move past feelings of being “stuck” or “blocked”, and used TCM descriptors to refer to such shifts in energy or sense of movement in life overall.
• "I'll say a Mi Sheberach for you": Ritual, prayer and healing among liberal American Jews | Gila Silverman
In recent years, the Jewish prayer for healing, the Mi Sheberach (literally, “the one who blessed”), has become one of the central elements of North American liberal (non-Orthodox) religious and ritual life. In addition to recitation in synagogues, prayers for healing are now chanted in hospital rooms, during support groups and meditation classes, and at dedicated healing services; multiple new Jewish prayers for healing have been created, building on the traditional formula and adapting it for caregivers, health care providers, those undergoing specific medical procedures, and those living with chronic conditions. Much research on prayer and healing has focused on determining prayer’s efficacy in producing particular biomedical outcomes. In this paper, I draw on ongoing ethnographic research among liberal Jews in the American Southwest, to argue instead that prayers for healing change the trajectory of the illness journey, for both the ill and their caregivers, in ways far more diverse than can be captured in standard clinical narratives. Among this secular-religious population, for whom the practice of Judaism coexists with the pursuit of biomedicine, prayer creates a feeling of connection to community, ancestors and traditions, as well as generating emotional transformation and spiritual transcendence.
Can stress make you sick? Can belief help healing? Do the place and space around you affect your emotions and health? These are the questions that Dr. Sternberg explores in her books “Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-being” and The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions. In her lecture, Dr. Sternberg will answer these questions and will address how the science of the mind-body connection explains these phenomena. She will take the mind-body connection beyond the skin, beyond the biopsychosocial model of health and discuss how the physical environment, through each of the senses, can affect emotions negatively or positively, by triggering the brain’s stress or relaxation responses. These in turn explain how place and space can either help healing or potentially harm health. Dr. Sternberg will review the many connections between the brain and the immune system, which underlie these effects. Understanding these concepts will help health and design professionals incorporate health and wellbeing outcomes in the design of the built environment, including offices, schools, healthcare facilities, homes, and the urban environment.
The lecture will assist individuals in structuring their personal environment to enhance wellbeing and prevent disease. It will address policy implications for the inclusion of health and wellbeing outcomes in setting standards for green building design, and will propose a new vision of health and wellbeing, in which health and design professionals partner in a new frontier of medicine: person and place-centered health and wellbeing, For more information, see www.ipw.arizona.edu.
Join us for the “Practical Applications of Research in Humanities, Medicine, and Wellness” panel which features University of Arizona experts from multiple disciplines as they discuss issues related to contemplative reflexivity as a humanities-based approach, the Native voice and professional identities through empathy. Dean Wildner-Bassett begins with the application of contemplative reflexivity and experiential methods, which offers a complementary approach to both teaching and research in explorations of the mind and world. The following presentation by Lisa Falk, MAT, discusses the ramifications of “Through the Eyes of the Eagle: Illustrating Healthy Living” exhibit at Arizona State Museum, which integrates culture and art to make health issues accessible, relevant, and inspiring. Finally, Paul D. Bennett, J.D., and Kenney Hegland, LL.M., LL.B., discuss the importance of humanities for healthy, integrated professional identities.
• Perspectives on Educational Wellness: Contemplative Reflexivity, the Humanities, Leadership Practice, and Learning | Mary Wildner-Bassett
This contribution will focus on possibilities for enhancing personal and educational wellness through contemplative reflexivity as a Humanities-based approach. The discussion first explores a few important contributions from theory and applications of complexity/dynamic systems, relational leadership, and critical social-constructivist concepts. We will then engage in a discussion of ways that self-awareness and introspection, along with collaborative and experiential construction of knowledge and contemplative inquiry, can be applied in classrooms or leadership contexts to address the human craving for “…something beyond the instrumental modes in which we operate most of the time.”[1] The applications and examples will show how reflective, contemplative, and experiential methods developed within the contemplative traditions offer a complementary set of teaching and even research methods for Humanities-based explorations of the mind and world.
1 Interview with Rosemary G. Feal, Executive Director of the Modern Language Association. Posted by Ernesto Priego on 4/29/13.
• Collaborations that Make a Difference: Engaging the Community around Health and Culture | Lisa Falk
Lisa Falk, project director and lead curator (ASM’s director of education), will present a broad humanities project and the various approaches she and her partners took to make health issues accessible, relevant, and inspiring. In fall 2011, Arizona State Museum (ASM) displayed the exhibit Through the Eyes of the Eagle: Illustrating Healthy Living about diabetes awareness and prevention. With extensive community input and collaboration, ASM expanded a traveling exhibit of illustrations from a children’s book series, making it relevant to Southern Arizona, by including historical and contemporary cultural objects and photographs, archaeological research, hands-on activities, and the Native voice to explore the issue of diabetes and culture over time and the role culture plays in combating this epidemic. Working with the knowledge and resources of many community and university partners, ASM produced the expanded exhibit, created a digital comic book, organized diverse programming, and created related resource materials. Evaluations indicated that these offerings engaged and inspired museum visitors to eat healthier, get active, promote health, and connect to cultural traditions.
• Reaching the Human Side of Being a Professional: Humanities Education for Students of Law and Medicine | Paul Bennett, Kenney Hegland
Lawyers have been described as technocrats, hired guns, mechanics. The same has been said of doctors. Who hasn’t heard a complaint about some physician’s bedside manner? It is serious enough to warrant serious study. See, e.g. Empathy: Bench to Bedside (Decety, 2011)); (Shaprio, 2011); Decety, Yang, Chen, 2009). Professors Kenney Hegland and Paul Bennett, authors of “A Short and Happy Guide to Being a Lawyer,” regularly teach “Law and Humanities” at the College of Law. The course gives law students a forum through which they can step outside professional training and take time to think about human connections. We propose to lead a roundtable discussion of how using the humanities can help students find their professional identities. We will propose and discuss a joint law and medical student humanities class. For example, in past years, we integrated Stephen Johnson’s The Ghost Map into law student preparation for the Medical School’s IP Pan Flu exercise. Why not a joint adventure?
Join us for the “Wellness, Affective Citizenship, and the Politics of Health” presentation which features University of Arizona faculty from various departments including English, East Asian Studies, Anthropology, Gender and Women’s Studies and History. Beginning with a presentation on China’s government campaign for reducing video game addiction, Hai Ren, Ph.D., exposes one way in which political systems influence health. This will be followed by an analysis by Susan Shaw, Ph.D., on how limited access to care by low-income patients instills both vulnerability and proactive attitudes towards cancer screening. “Immigration Reform,” presented by Eithne Luibheid, Ph.D., explores the competing issues of immigration reform proposals and the connection with health and immigrant wellness. Lastly, Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, Ph.D., will present “Social Medicine Praxis under Military Dictatorship in Chile” which focusses on a 1970’s coup which caused health care providers to find new ways to practice medicine despite political violence.
• Wellness Aesthetics: Affective and Intellectual Reponses to Video Game Addiction Campaigns in China | Hai Ren
Video game development is a fast growing sector of China's cultural industries. Millions of Chinese youth play online and mobile video games on the daily basis. In recent years, the Chinese government has officially identified video game addiction as a subset of internet addiction that requires medical and educational intervention. Meanwhile, game players have actively responded to official medical and pedagogical discourses through creative projects such as videos, music, games, and mobile apps. The paper examines official media narratives of video game addiction as part of the government's campaign for reducing video game addiction. It also explores the aesthetics of artistic responses by video game players – of both sensible/affective and perceptive aspects of their arts. This project aims at addressing how aesthetics, which concerns both affect (particularly pleasure) and perception of artistic practice, produces wellness as an alternative to official medical and pedagogical treatments of video game addiction.
• Anxious Provocations: Engagements with Cancer Screening by the Medically Underserved | Susan Shaw
Many in public health and cancer control seek to expand utilization of cancer screening technologies by medically underserved populations as a means of reducing cancer health disparities. Presenting findings from ethnographic research at a Massachusetts community health center, this paper explores the way diverse low-income patients experience and respond to the provocations of cancer screening. Many patients we interviewed described a proactive attitude towards engaging with cancer screenings, an orientation which coexisted with increased anxiety and worry which was generally allayed on receiving an “all clear.” This paper interrogates the screening imperative by focusing on patients’ experiences of anxiety and their understandings of and affective responses to test results. How is the anxiety that accompanies screenings configured by patients’ structural vulnerabilities? I argue that a proactive orientation towards cancer screening reveals patients’ hopeful enactment of biomedical citizenship while exposing them to technologically-mediated risks and vulnerabilities related to their limited access to care.
• Immigration Reform: Competing Possibilities for Happiness, Health and Wellness | Eithne Luibheid, Ph.D
Happiness is extolled as a route to (and measure of) health and wellness. But in the context of immigration reform proposals, the connections among happiness, health, and wellness prove complex and competing. Congressional immigration reform proposals are mired in debates about whether or not to allow a path to legal status for millions of undocumented people in the U.S. Some resist offering legal status on the grounds that it “rewards law-breaking” and will cause social breakdown, thereby generating unhappiness for everyone. Others argue for allowing legal status on terms that citizens define, which will create convergence between immigrants’ and citizen’ lives that generates happiness for the majority.
Still others suggest that the current legalization suggestions will make it impossible for most immigrants to actually legalize, while deepening the abandonment of many citizens by government. How should immigration reform balance these competing claims about different groups’ possibilities for happiness, which have significant implications for health and wellness?
• Social Medicine Praxis under Military Dictatorship in Chile: Of Health Care Initiatives, Survival Strategies, and Resistance | Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney
This study seeks to illustrate that the 1973 military coup in Chile dismantled a functioning public health system, but that it could not eradicate all health care practices that doctors adopted in previous decades. I start with a brief analysis of the roots of social medicine praxis in the 1930s and 40s - and of the debates over socialized medicine that led to the foundation of the National Health Service in 1952. The main part of this presentation focuses on the period of military dictatorship and on the regime’s effort to destroy the institutions of the public health system. While military leaders linked both social and socialized medicine to the leftist political system they sought to destroy, their destruction of old institutions could not prevent the independent, often clandestine initiatives by medical doctors whose innovative strategies created a continuity in health care practices in spite of the threat of military violence. Physicians and health care workers treated people in new Centros Integrales de Salud (CIS), and through alternative health teams that adopted medical and psychological treatments to offer both medical care and survival strategies under state terrorism
Join us for the “Science, Healthcare and Healing” presentation featuring University of Arizona experts from multiple disciplines as they discuss issues related to health sciences and the humanities. Presenter Russell S. Witte, Ph.D., will address questions of electricity and often forgotten scientific contributions of the last centuries. Panelists Melinda H. Connor, D.D., Ph.D., AMP, FAM, Sallyanne Payton, J.D., and Hansonia Caldwell, Ph.D., will look at the neuro-plasticity of language, timing and working memory through music. Both presentations will explore 19th and 20th century scientific discoveries, as well as current neurological understandings of the brain and how they apply to medicine and healing in the 21st century.
• Shaking Up Healthcare with Electricity and Vibration: Revisiting Scientists of the Past in the Context of Twenty-first Century Medicine | Russell Witte
Might the clues for the future of healthcare reside in the past? The great inventor Nikola Tesla once proclaimed, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” My talk will examine little known discoveries in biology, physics and medicine that challenge the traditional chemical model of the human body. Is it possible to cure (or cause) disease with resonant electric fields? Can electricity promote tissue regeneration? Can vibrations produced by a flash of light be useful for diagnostic imaging? This presentation will revisit the work of some of the most fascinating and often forgotten scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries and put them in context with 21st century medicine.
• Healing for the Brain with Music that Feeds the Soul: Reverse Engineering Neurological Processes with Lessons Learned from the Antebellum Negro Spiritual | Melinda Connor, Sallyanne Payton, Hansonia Caldwell
We have reverse engineered the Antebellum Negro Spiritual from a perspective based in historical reports and modern day observation combined with the most current neurological understanding of today to present a theory of the healing described in the historical literature which provides a template for the healing music of tomorrow. With participation of the motor, visual, auditory and somatosensory cortex, the frontal-parietal religious circuit including the dorsolateral prefrontal, dorsomedial frontal and medial parietal cortex, the fronto-temporal network including the ventral and dorsal streams with multimodal and stepwise integration of brain response, the stage is set for improved neuro-plasticity. This includes growth in executive function, language, timing and working memory. When we then combine category-specific activation with call and response, with pseudo-binaural beat processes with the resultant triggering and down regulation of the Norepinephrine-Serotonin cycle we add increased ability to evaluate situations of cognitive dissonance and abstract congruence.
Join us for the “Art of Healing” presentation which features University of Arizona experts from various departments such as Psychology, Psychiatry, English and Religious Studies. This panel will offer a range of perspectives on the promise of bridging the work of health sciences and wellness initiatives with the interdisciplinary contributions of Applied and Public Humanities.
• Opening remarks by Ole Thienhaus: Trained in Evidence Based Medicine (EBM): How Do I Fit in the Art of Healing?
• Opening Remarks by Fenton Johnson: Art of Healing
• Opening Remarks by Mark Gilbert: Humanistic Medicine and Health Care: Definitions, Key Components and Challenges in 2014
• Opening Remarks by Hester Oberman: Bridging Humanities, Medicine, and Wellness