The Social Life of Medical Anecdotes

Recorded November 7th, 2024. A hybrid seminar by Dr Brian Hurwitz (Emeritus Professor of Medicine and the Arts at the Centre for the Humanities and Health, King’s College London) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series. Abstract: Medicine is strewn with anecdotes, brief, pointed accounts of human episodes, drawn from scattered zones of healthcare experience. Traditionally viewed as a short form medical discourse which encompasses case reports, aphorisms, witticisms and hybridised versions of such texts and utterances, some are artfully fashioned micro-narratives, others ‘twitchily alive’ observations and dialogues. Frequently dismissed as epistemologically doubtful if not misleading frippery, he approaches anecdotes and the medically anecdotal as vernacular patient practices which support descriptive and moral insights into the sociality and power relations of medicine. An ‘unauthorised’, unregulated idiom, which does not seek to isolate events and experiences from subjective thoughts and feelings about them, anecdotes express a standpoint epistemology that articulates healthcare circumstances in new light. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/