Sense and Nonsense
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27th-30th August 2019, University of Birmingham, UK

This biennial conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health marks the 30^th anniversary of the Association since its founding conference in Strasbourg in 1989. The title of the conference has been chosen to recognise key themes at the heart of medical history debates and discussions, and will take place in the heart of England, at the University of Birmingham.

Confirmed keynote speakers include Professor Ludmilla Jordanova (University of Durham), Professor Robert Jütte (University of Stuttgart) and Dr Vanessa Heggie (University of Birmingham). Expert sessions on public engagement and social media, among others, will also be run by Dr Vanessa Heggie and Alice Roberts, television presenter and Professor of Science Engagement (University of Birmingham) specifically for early career scholars on the first day of the conference.

Call for Papers

In the most literal of senses, the Scientific Board welcomes abstracts that will explore the history of sense perception, singularly or collectively and within medicine and health globally over the broadest of chronologies. Centring on touch, taste, smell, sight, sound or the heightened, honed, dulling, disability or loss of senses, or touching on their employment through food, pain, analgesia, polluted streets or pestiferous zones – and the emotional responses elicited – this conference encourages engagement with the emerging field of sensory history and its potential to revisit many familiar topics in fresh ways and provoke new insights.

We particularly welcome proposals for panels touching on these and other topics, including, but not limited to:

• Epistemologies of the senses through time
• Animal, human, inter-species and transhuman senses
• Reading non-verbal signals in medical and health communication
• Extra/sensory perception and its metaphors across cultures and clinics
• Looking, listening, touching, smelling and tasting in medical education, examination and diagnosis
• Energy, chakras, meditation, mindfulness and the senses and their management
• Pain, torture, itching, scratching, numbing and sedating as experience, punishment or therapy
• Hyper-sensitivity, diversity, ability or disability through the senses, including burns, light sensitivity, synaesthesia, acute hearing or sight loss
• Insensibility, numbing, drugs and psychoactive substances
• Enabling technologies and technologies of touch, tactile imagery and haptic healing
• Material culture and experiences of space through the senses, health, illness or as patients
• Feeling and feelings, both injured and healed
• Mental capacity, signs of reason, neurological signs and auras
• Fever, chills, hallucination, delusion and trauma
• Nonsense, speaking in tongues, gibberish and jargon
• Paradigm shifts and schisms in medicine and medical history
• Ethics, experimentation and the return to common sense
• Experiments, therapies or designs using the senses or sensory deprivation
• Making sense of medicine and translating ideas into practice
• Geographies of the senses; virtual worlds, simulation and technology

Individual submissions will be received until 30 Jan. 2019 and should comprise of a 250-word abstract, including five key words, and a one-page CV with contact information. Panel submissions should ideally include three papers (each with 250-word abstract, keywords and short CV), a chair and an initial introductory 100-word justification. If you wish to organise a roundtable, please include the names of participants and short 500-word abstract. We also invite poster presentations and ideas of novel sessions. As this is an anniversary year, the organisers will also be collecting images and items commemorating the work and activities of the EAHMH since its founding – sense or nonsense, please bring anything you are happy to share.

All submissions should be sent to: eahmh2019@contacts.bham.ac.uk