Dangerous Currents: Risk and regulation at the interface of medicine and the arts, Association for Medical Humanities Conference 2015

Bleakley, Alan, Lynch, Larry, Taylor, Kerry, Whalley, Joanne, Fussell, Ian, Marshal, Robert and Whelan, Gregg ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5434-5985 (2015) Dangerous Currents: Risk and regulation at the interface of medicine and the arts, Association for Medical Humanities Conference 2015. [Conference]

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Abstract / Summary

A member of the Organising Committee for the 2015 AMH conference

'The 2015 Association for Medical Humanities annual conference takes as
its theme critical conversations between medicine (including surgery, and encompassing healthcare) and the arts (including the humanities and the liberal social sciences) focused on issues of risk and regulation. Again, we live in a culture that, paradoxically, generates risk (especially in the economic sphere) at the same time as it generates more and more regulation. Our greatest risk is that of environmental degradation, yet we continue to make aggregate lifestyle choices that are creating irreversible environmental damage. Our lifestyle choices – junk food, lack of exercise – are so often at odds with maintaining ‘health’ and medicine’s resources are heavily biased towards curative intervention rather than prevention.
Art, too, is, or should be, a risky business. I have nothing against art that pleases but surely the main role of the artist is to subvert, upset and challenge habit and convention to make us ‘think otherwise’. Art in critical conversation with medicine should make us think otherwise about descriptors such as ‘health’ and ‘wellbeing’. Nietzsche (and later Gilles Deleuze) described artists as ‘diagnosticians’ or ‘symptomatologists’ of the body of culture – setting out which symptoms emerge in a culture and how we might treat them. Our most pressing symptoms are environmental degradation, and poverty leading to health issues caused by the 1% phenomenon – that the richest 1% are making obscene amounts of money that do not help to raise quality of life for all because of lack of proper redistribution of wealth. The wide range of performances, drama, lm, conversations and discussion of ideas presented in this conference (from delegates and invited artists, doctors and surgeons) will debate Nietzsche’s notion as they address the conversation between risk and regulation across medicine and the arts'

Professor Alan Bleakley
President Association for Medical Humanities
Emeritus Professor of Medical Education Plymouth University Peninsula School of Medicine
Visiting Scholar Wilson Centre University of Toronto

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