11–12 October 2019
Hörsaalzentrum, Medical University of Vienna
Waehringer Guertel 18-20, 1090 Vienna
How medicine is practiced is largely determined by culture. An interdisciplinary field called Medical Humanities has developed at the interface medicine – humanities and social sciences, as well as at the interface medicine – the arts.
This international conference has its general focus on the interactions between medicine and the arts, but will also deal more specifically with how medicine is reflected in visual/applied arts, music, literature/media and vice versa.
In treating illness, there is a growing movement towards considering the link between mind, body and soul and incorporating the arts into medical curricula in order to stimulate empathic behavior in students and, hence, to sharpen their clinical observation skills. Hospitals and medical consulting rooms are becoming increasingly global places with cross-cultural patients and different religious influences, ways of dealing with death and attitudes to the separation of body and soul, so that subjective disease concepts have to be kept in mind.
- 11. October
Morning: Medicine and Visual/Applied Arts
Afternoon: Medicine and Music - 12. October
Morning: Medicine and Literature/Media
In addition, there will be two Keynote Lectures given by Jane Macnaughton (Durham University, U.K.) and Dietrich von Engelhardt (Universität Lübeck).
*„Arts“ are to be understood as the hypernym for all kinds of arts, „interactions“ as
medicine in the arts and the arts in medicine. The conference will provide suggestions
for the inclusion of Medical Humanities in medical study and practice
(Dietrich von Engelhardt).
Psychophysiology studies with musicians in the Motion-Emotion-Lab
Today, modern research equipment from sports medicine and science is also engaged in music performance science. At the University of Music in Vienna, music students come with "simple question" into the Lab, asking for instance: "What do I make different in stress situations or on stage, then during practicing at home, when I played perfect?". A variety of measurement techniques allow e.g. to study small changes in muscle tensions (EMG), breathing patterns (BIO-Sensors) or body movements (Motion Capture) in different performing situations or with varying adaptions of the instrument or playing techniques.
Most approaches have to combine psychological, physiological and acoustic aspects to understand the complex process of performing. Practicing technics are trained since cen¬turies and musicians exercises often for many hours a day. In professionals this results quite often in complains, overuse syndromes or mental crisis.
Scientific studies allow to document, to analyse and ideally to find new approaches to opti-mize the performance and to reduce stress factors. As trumpet player himself, he made several analyses on aspects of trumpet playing. How fast can one tonguing? Which air-pressure or lip pressure is necessary? Besides presenting short insights in his work, Bertsch reports of achievement of the "Austrian Society for Music and Medicine", founded 10 years ago.
Matthias Bertsch
Professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. He is the actual President of the Austrian Society for Music and Medicine (OeGfMM.at) and head of the "Motion-Emotion-Lab" at the Department of Music Physiology. He studied musicology at the University of Vienna, graduated with a (PhD) in 1999, with his works on trumpet performance in the fields of "Musical Acoustics" and "Musical Physiology".
With his research on aspects of typical Viennese orchestra instruments in 2003 he qualified as a professor with tenure track in musical acoustics at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. In 2008, Bertsch trained as a biofeedback coach and joined the musician’s health group at the Music University as scientist in the field of music physiology. His interdisciplinary music research is focused toward empirical and data-oriented methods in the area of psychology, acoustics, organology, psychoacoustics, physiology and cognitive science. As a trumpeter, he performed within philharmonic Orchestra, Big Bands and brass quintets.
A multi-sensory Medical Humanities: illness, care and critical pedagogy
Visual and material culture have not been as influential as literature, history and increasingly so¬cial sciences in the development of the medical humanities to date. However, this is chan¬ging in the context of recent calls (primarily from the UK) for a less instrumental and more ‘entangled’ in a disciplinary sense medical humanities field (Whitehead and Woods 2016; Johnstone 2018). The visual and the performing arts, with their focus on the body and the senses, have been welcomed as possible alternatives to the dominance of narrative accounts of patient experience and to the practice of ‘narrative medicine’ within medical education in America.
My talk will briefly situate my research in illness narrative across different art forms in relation to these developments towards a more visual and ‘critical’ medical humanities. I will then offer some specific reflections on what the field can contribute to understandings of illness, care and pedagogy by drawing on an interdisciplinary project I am leading, "Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities". In addition to being a radical format of bringing art to a wider public, the artist’s book is an innovative and versatile medium that can convey a multi-sensory experience of illness. By engaging in productive dialogue with each other, the histories and practices of medicine and of book arts can begin to address a similar set of concerns around health and care that can broaden their respective disciplinary tools. To illustrate these ideas, I will share examples of contemporary artists’ books from the exhibition Prescriptions that I curated in Canterbury, UK (Beaney Art Museum, 2016) and discuss the project’s collaborative activities with artists, patients and health professionals.
Stella Bolaki
Reader in Medical Humanities in the School of English at the University of Kent. She is the author of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and has published articles in Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Mosaic, Textual Practice as well as in several edited volumes. She is also the Director of Kent’s postgraduate programme in Medical Humanities.
Unsettling care in contemporary French end-of-life memoirs
This paper focuses on three autobiographical narratives about dementia, Annie Ernaux’s Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit (1997), Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Sur ma mère (2008) and Michel Malherbe’s Alzheimer: La vie, la mort, la reconnaissance (2015). Against the background of the work of feminist scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, who has called for a politics of ‘unsettling care’, these narratives are explored as a means to unsettle the idealized vision of care that has haunted the philosophy and practice of palliative care since its inception. The so-called ‘integration of the psychological and spiritual aspects of patient care’, which con-stitutes a foundational principle of palliative care is shown to reach its limitations in these texts, and the ‘support system to help families cope during the patients’ illness and in their own bereavement’ is by and large absent in these narratives (current WHO definition of palliative care). Considering the clash between non-Western and Western visions of care, the paper’s exploration of these contemporary narratives also aims to illustrate the ways in which dementia constitutes a particular challenge for palliative care.
Anna Magdalena Elsner
Marie Heim-Vögtlin Fellow (Swiss National Science Foundation) at the Center for Medical Hu¬manities and the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of Zurich. After a PhD in French literature and philosophy (University of Cambridge, 2011), Anna was a junior research fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Center for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London. She is the author of Mourning and Creativity in Proust (2017) and numerous articles on twentieth-century French literature, philosophy and documentary cinema. She is co-founder of the Swiss Network for Ethics of Care. In her current book project she explores the concept and practice of palliative care and the ways in which it has shaped the depiction of dying in French literature since 1975.
‚Medical Humanities‘ oder Therapie als Kunst – Kunst als Therapie | "Medical Humanities" or therapy as art – art as therapy
Since ancient times, medicine has been understood as an art (lat. ars) and not just as science (scientia) as well as a combination of natural sciences and humanities – be it for the under-standing of illness, for opening therapy goals or for the doctor-patient relationship. Likewise, therapeutic power was attributed to the arts in the way of dealing with the disease. In the modern era, emphasis increasingly shifted to the natural sciences and technology – with impressive successes in diagnostics and therapy, in life extension and improvement in quality of life. At the same time anthropological losses and biological reductions occurred, and today scientific medicine faces the challenge of connecting man's psycho-physical and social-cultural nature with natural sciences and technology.
It is not a question of alternative or fringe medicine, but a question of complements to science-based medicine for the benefit of the sick and the dying. Science and humanities are not a contradiction, they are rather going hand in hand. Currently, 'personalized medicine', 'evidence-based medicine' and 'precision medicine' are programmatic orientations with a conceptually essential role of literature, painting and music. The meaning of "person" exceeds by far genetic or biological individuality, it also involves subjective and social dimensions. The meaning of 'evidence' can be an empirical-statistical proof as well as intuition. The meaning of 'precision' is an objective as well as a subjective concerning self-perceptions and foreign judgements. "Medical Humanities" is able to establish a connection between medicine, science, humanities and the arts. Then, in a double sense human medicine is medicine for humans and human as well.
Dietrich von Engelhardt
Born 1941 in Göttingen, Dr. phil. 1969 in Heidelberg, research and psychotherapy in criminology in Heidelberg, 1971 Assistent at the Institute of History of Medicine in Heidelberg, 1976 medical habilitation, 1983-2007 Ordinary Professor and Director of the Institute History of Medicine and Science in Lübeck, 1993-1996 Vicepresident of the University, 1998-2002 President of the German Academy of Ethics in Medicine, 1995 Member of the Leopoldina Na-tionale Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001-2010 Vice-President of the Landesethikkomitee von Südtirol (South Tyrol/Alto Adige), 2001 Member of the Academia Argentina de Ética en Medicina, 2008-2011 Director of the Institute History and Ethics of Medicine in München (TUM), 2009-2017 Professor for History and Ethics of Medicine at the Asklepios Medical School Budapest/Hamburg.
Topics of research: history of medical ethics; ethics in medical education; theory of medicine and psychiatry; coping of the patient; bibliotherapy; medicine in literature; medicine and natural science in the era of romanticism around 1800; biographies of scientists and physicians; scientific relationships in Europe in the 18th and 19th century.
Dr. Dick Diver – Portrait eines Psychiaters in F. Scott Fitzgeralds Roman "Zärtlich ist die Nacht" | Dr. Dick Diver – Portrait of a psychiatrist in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "Tender is the Night"
Freud once wrote that psychoanalysis drew attention to phenomena that had long been "dis-covered" and described by poets and writers in their literary works and attempted to grasp them scientifically. In the Medical Humanities, a similar approach is taken in present times: Not least novels and poems can convey empathy and insight into the aetiology and conse-quences of many clinical phenomena in a very vivid way.
A paradigmatic example for field of expertise is the story of the 26-year-old US-American psychiatrist Doctor Richard Diver, who during the First World War completed his training with stages first in Oxford (1914) and then in Vienna (1916), before finally completing it in Zurich (1917). During his time in Vienna, he stayed at Damenstiftgasse in order to experience Freud personally. After the war (1919), Doctor Diver returned to Zurich into a scientific environment marked by psychodynamic psychiatry and C.G. Jung, in order to begin his scientific career with a manuscript that was ready for publication. At the clinic where Doctor Diver practiced during the war (1917), he also came into fleeting contact with a seriously ill patient, a victim of incest, who developed an intense transference-love for him and began a correspondence marked by this as soon as he left the clinic. As the clinic became aware of this correspondence, Doctor Diver was confronted with it and asked to leave. Due to the impressive and unexpected im¬prove¬ment in the condition of former patient Nicole, Doctor Diver decides to reciprocate the pa¬tient's feelings and marry her. In his married life with Nicole, he creates ideal conditions for her further stabilization, neglecting his scientific and clinical career, finally giving it up alto¬gether and becoming increasingly addicted to alcohol. However, Doctor Diver does not leave Ni¬cole, even though her progressive improvement goes hand in hand with his decay and the ab¬andonment of his ethical principles, until Nicole becomes interested in another man and leaves her psychiatrist and husband, who has eventually become an alcoholic, for a new marriage.
In the novel, the confusion between a clinical phenomenon ("transference-love") and a psycho¬physical process in average life (falling in love and love), as well as their consequences, are told literally with the unbiased view of the writer, who knew neither the technical con¬siderations nor the recommended handling of this clinical phenomenon. Furthermore, phe¬no¬mena belonging to the field of transmission of trauma are described in detail without any cli¬nical prior knowledge on the part of the writer.
Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch
Professor of Psychotherapy Research and Head of the Division Psychodynamics at the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences in Krems as well as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. She is full member of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). She is also a member of the Commission for Science Ethics as well as a member of the Commission for History and Philosophy of Science and Hu¬manities of the ÖAW. She serves as Chair of the Maimonides Lectures (with Univ.-Prof. Hans-Dieter Klein also a full member of the ÖAW) as well as Speaker of the ÖAW Committee Lower Austria and Burgenland of the ÖAW. Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch is psychoanalyst as well as training and supervising analyst of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (WPV) and of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). Since 2000, she is Research Fellow der IPA (RTP).
She served as a member (2005-2012) of the Psychoanalysis and the University Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) as well as its Co-Chair (2012-2017) until the achievement of the Committee´s task. Since 2012, she serves on the editorial boards of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Trauma and Memory. European Review of Psychoanalysis and Social Science. Since 2016, she serves as one of the editors of "Sigmund Freud’s Works. Viennese Interdisciplinary Commentaries" (SFW-WIK) published by Vienna University Press and V& R unipress.
She published several articles in scientific journals and chapters in books. She edited Psycho-analyse im Dialog der Wissenschaften. Vol. 1: Europäische Perspektiven and Vol. 2: Angloamerikanische Perspektiven (2002–2004), Psychoanalysis as an Empirical, Interdisciplinary Science (2005), Geist, Gehirn, Verhalten: Sigmund Freud und die modernen Wissenschaften (2009) and the new edition of Freuds The Ego and the Es (forthcoming). She co-edited The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, 3 Vol. (1993-2000) translated in five langueges, Fere
czi’s Turn in Psychoanalysis (1996, 2000) as well as Sensory Perception. Mind and Matter (2012).
Current main interests: First-person methodologies in psychotherapy research; philosophical investigations of subjective states of mind; history and philosophy of science (especially psychodynamic and psychological disciplines) as well as medical humanities.
Arthur Schnitzler: "Spa Doctor Graesler" – the doctor-patient relationship and understanding of disease at the beginning of the 20th century
In the 19th century the spa and drinking cure, based on naturopathy, boomed in Europe. In Austria, Johann von Oppolzer (1808-1871), head of the Second Vienna Medical School of the University of Vienna, was one of the sponsors of spas. In contrast to the "therapeutic nihilism" of the "Vienna Medical School", Oppolzer focused on integrated diagnosis and therapy.
In 1917 the writer and doctor Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) published his novella Spa Doctor Graesler (1917), whose protagonist of the same name worked as a spa doctor in various re-sorts during the summer months. This story was influenced by Guy de Maupassant's novel Mont-Oriol (1887), which contains satires about spa doctors.
The presentation is divided into three parts. The first part will examine how the spa treatment and the profession of a spa doctor are presented in this novel. Next, the relationship between the protagonist (or nurse) and the patients who suffer from various diseases and seek medical treatment will be analyzed. Finally, the diseases of the patients, particularly scarlet fever, are analyzed. The purpose of this presentation is to show how doctors should behave towards their patients using Schnitzler's works as an example. The question will be posed as to how an ambivalent relationship between the doctors and his patients influences the therapy.
Tomoyo Kaba
Born 1988 in Osaka (Japan), for her doctorate studies of Modern German Literature at the Universities of Vienna and Kyoto. For her master's degree, 2008-2014, she studied German at the University of Kyoto. Since 2017 has held a scholarship at the Japan Student Services Organisation. Title of the dissertation: "On the representation of diseases in the works of Arthur Schnitzler". Most recent publication (2018): "Arthur Schnitzler and the Vienna School of Medicine. On the description of disease around 1900", in: Daniela Angetter, Birgit Nemec, Herbert Posch, Christiane Druml, Paul Weindling (Ed. ), Structures and Networks - Viennese Medicine 1848-1955 (Göttingen: Vienna University Press|V&R unipress 2018), 373-391.
Music and medicine: perspectives from the Medical Humanities
This paper will examine the relationship between music and medicine from the point of view of the emerging discipline of Medical Humanities. It will consider how insights from the humanities, including the history of medicine, aesthetics and musicology, can both inform, support or challenge the increasingly dominant scientific and medical paradigms for understanding how music works. In conclusion, it will look at what developing this kind of Critical Neuroscience of Music can tell us about the character and purpose of Medical Humanities more broadly.
James Kennaway
Senior Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton in London. He was one of the co-editors of the Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being that was just published in December, and in 2012 published his monograph on "Bad Vibrations: The history of the idea of music as a cause of disease". He has worked on Freud and music and his interests include Viennese and French psychiatry. Kennaway was leading the Masterclass in Medical Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. For six months he was a Richard-Plaschka scholarship holder at the University of Vienna.
Krankheitserzählungen im Comic: Ästhetische und gesellschaftspolitische Aspekte der "Graphic Medicine" | Illness Stories in Comics: Aesthetic and Sociopolitical Aspects of "Graphic Medicine"
The experience of living with illness and disability – a very private matter that at the same time is embedded in and shaped by historical, social, cultural, and political contexts – has always been explored in literary texts, be they fictional or (auto-)biographical. The medium of comics has joined this cultural conversation in the 20th century. In 2012, British cartoonist and physician Ian Williams coined the term "Graphic Medicine” for comics that present the perspectives of patients, family members, caregivers, or medical practitioners. Many of these visual-verbal narratives offer intimate insights that complement the clinical / medical view and seek to find specific artistic ways to present extraordinary and sometimes life-threatening personal experiences. Drawing on a variety of examples from different countries, this paper will introduce key topics, analyze aesthetic strategies and discuss the sociopolitical impact of illness stories in comics.
Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff
Professor of German literature at Freie Universität Berlin. Her main fields of interest include 18th-21st century literature with a focus on the interrelations between literary and medical knowledge. She is academic lead of the 2016-2021 "PathoGraphics" research project which analyzes the aesthetics and politics of illness narratives in contemporary comics and literature (www.fsgs.fu-berlin.de/pathographics). She has published on transplantation surgery in literature, film, medicine and public discourse (Verpflanzungsgebiete. Wissenskulturen und Poetik der Transplantation, Munich 2012); medical, aesthetic, and literary approaches to wounded bodies around 1800 (Der versehrte Körper. Revisionen des klassizistischen Schönheitsideals, Göttingen 2001); the ethics and aesthetics of narrating Alzheimer’s disease; written and drawn stories about (neuro-)prosthetics; and concepts of authorship.
Every illness is a musical problem, healing a musical resolution (Novalis)
Medicine and music go hand in hand in thousands of cultures for millennia. Body biorhythms and musical structures are closely related. Medico-didactically, in ancient Greece music has been one of the "seven liberal arts" and part of the medical curriculum. Musically/compositionally, physiological processes are reflected in the Gregorian "Neum" notation, in the baroque "doctrine of the affections" and by modern "functional composition". As chronobiology and chrono-medicine teach us, in a healthy organism all biorhythms resonate in mathematical harmony. Diseases on the other hand have pathophysiological effects such as biorhythmic chaos. Today, Novalis' intuitive description can be objectified by means of the technical detection of biological rhythms. It also demonstrates the complementary medical impact of music on an evidence-based level. Although the mechanisms of action of the music on the mind and body can be described in many different ways, so far, they have eluded a stringent uniform explanatory model. As "pars pro toto" a description about the "autonomous empire" of the vegetative nervous system: If music participates as a structured gear in the transmission of autonomous rhythms, a biological resynchronization can be supported. This positive medico-musical rhythmic interaction, in which disturbed pathophysiological processes can benefit from structured musical energy, is termed "entrainment" by modern research. An optical-simultaneous representation of process and dynamics in biological and musical parameters is able to illustrate this effect of music medicine.
Klaus-Felix Laczika
Childhood and youth in St. Florian. First piano lessons with Prof. Franz Wall. Medical studies at the University of Vienna. Music studies (Music Theory, Conducting, Correpetition) at the "Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts". Decisive musical impulses by Sergiu Celibidache. Intensive care physician at the University Clinic Vienna (clinical and scientific research focus on Music & Medicine).
Medical, scientific and musical cooperation with the Vienna Philharmonic. Regular concerts with members of the Vienna Philharmonic since 2007. Founder and Artistic Director of the Festival "St. Florianer BrucknerTage".
Symptom and sensation in breathlessness: medical humanities meets clinical neuroscience
Research in medical humanities has recently undergone a step change from being an educational exercise in ‘humanising’ clinical practitioners. Not content to be the ‘handmaiden’ of clinical practice, the field is now getting engaged in the complexities of clinical science, aiming to work alongside colleagues who are seeking to answer some of the most difficult questions in clinical practice. For example, the symptom of breathlessness presents a dilemma in that symptom experience does not correlate well with measured lung function. This offers opportunities for medical humanities to connect with clinical science and con-struct new ways to manage this distressing symptom. In this lecture I will give an overview of the trajectory of medical humanities and the development of its current conception as ‘critical medical humanities’. I will illustrate this new approach through a discussion of my Wellcome-Trust funded Life of Breath describing how we have developed collaborations that we hope will improve the lives of patients.
Jane Macnaughton
Professor of Medical Humanities at Durham University in the UK and Director of the University’s Institute for Medical Humanities (IMH). She has been centrally involved in the development of medical humanities in the UK since 1998. Most recently she conceived the idea of the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research which was established on the back of a meeting she initiated at Durham in February 2013 with the pur¬pose of strengthening the visibility of medical humanities research and encouraging col¬la¬boration across universities in the North of England, including Liverpool, and Scotland.
Jane currently holds two large awards from the Wellcome Trust: a Development Grant for the Institute for Medical Humanities and a Senior Investigator Award for her project, the Life of Breath. She sits on the Wellcome Trust Expert Review Group for established career awards in medical humanities. Her research focusses on the idea of the ‘symptom’: its initial appearance, development and evolution in connection with medical contexts, habits and technologies. She continues to be clinically active and is an Honorary Consultant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University Hospital of North Durham.
Using Medical Comics for teaching purposes at the Medical University of Vienna
Medical comics offer the possibility to address challenging situations within medical settings by using graphic illustrations. They can illustrate patient stories and as well address different perspectives of patients, caregivers or medical staff. At the Medical University of Vienna, three medical comics were used within an obligatory lecture for medical students. Thereby, the students got in touch with Medical Humanities and could reflect on sensitive topics first via an online platform followed by a discussion in the lecture hall. The integration of Medical Humanities into medical education served as a broad-based frame to address challenging aspects and was well accepted by medical students. As a result, an exhibition of medical comics called "IMPRESSION–EXPRESSION–INTERACTION – Perception in Medicine", that will be presented within this lecture, was organized and will take place at the Medical University of Vienna from October 2019 to January 2020. The exhibition will be divided into two areas. One part will contain an acquired exhibition from the Charité in Berlin called "Sick! Reclaiming Illness through Comics", the other part will contain the exhibition "Help! Help by using Medical Comics". Both areas are complemented by hands-on initiatives and self-reflection questions.
Eva Katharina Masel
Eva Katharina Masel, MD, PhD, MSc is working as a senior physician and deputy head at the division of palliative medicine, Department of Medicine I, Medical University of Vienna. Her main research focus is symptom management in patients suffering from incurable and progressive diseases. Her research focuses on palliative care of patients and families facing serious illnesses including psychosocial aspects and Medical Humanities. She has published several manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals.
Andrea Praschinger
Andrea Praschinger, Mag. Dr. is working at the Teaching Center, Medical University of Vienna. Her work focuses on clinical education within the curriculum of human medicine. Besides organizing clinical clerkships, her research focuses on clinical thinking and implementing new teaching strategies. Aside from her employment at the Medical University of Vienna, she is busy in history of medicine exploring the past of inpatient medical care.
Animierte Wissenschaft: Film als populäres und umstrittenes Lehr- und Forschungsinstrument in der Medizin
Animated science: film as a controversial and popular educational and research instrument in medicine
Cinematography appeared to be a "scientific marvel" for researchers and was negotiated as a possible teaching and research tool immediately after its introduction at the end of the 19th century. The filmed heartbeat of a dog, filmed during a vivisection at the physiological institute in 1896, was one of the first documented medical film experiments conducted in Vienna. In the public reception, however, the medial mode of expression film was initially perceived as an entertaining fairground attraction, leisure activity and artistic means of expression and was only marginally popularized as a potential public educational tool.
During WWI, cinema advanced further to be a popular entertainment venue. On the one hand, the screening of feature films served to distract from the war, on the other hand, the motion pictures were now used on a larger scale by national press offices as a propaganda tool for war coverage and production of military and hygienic educational films. Against the background of the daily routine of the war, not only new visual media such as film, but also new interventions in medical research became popular. In many cases, film and medicine met here in a remarkable way.
Immediately after the war, clinical films and so-called hygiene or public health films, were produced in Vienna and projected in popular education centers, universities and schools. Comparable pre-cinematographic forms of visualizing health and disease were primarily objects, such as medical wax models, which were considered most effective for life-like deterrence and disease prevention. But the use of other teaching aids, such as medical atlases or photographs, which were also produced in cooperation with artists and technicians, had a long tradition.
The predicate "artistically and scientifically valuable" was required for these educational films but was difficult to judge. The cooperation of physicians with film technicians and artists led in practice to conflicting but also enriching use of the medium. Physicians, scientists, university lecturers, educators, public health officials, film technicians, film producers and artists were equally debating on the potential and problems of 'health films’.
With the consideration of different institutions, actors and concepts, this paper therefore discusses to what extent the popular scientific health and hygiene film and medical educational film in Vienna of the 1920s as a modern teaching, advertising and art medium contributed to popularizing health-promoting concepts.
Katrin Pilz
Historian and cultural scientist. She has been working on a dissertation on early medical cinematography in Brussels and Vienna as part of a joint supervision Ph.D. at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in cooperation with the University of Vienna. Lectures, publications and research projects on the visual history of medicine and science, as well as urban history, body politics and educational film history. Member of several international scientific networks and part of the project team of the research group on medical history of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Co-curator at the current exhibition of the Historical Museum of Vienna on "Red Vienna", among others responsible for the sections on social welfare and health politics. she is currently key researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History within the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project on "Educational film practice in Austria”.
Using Medical Comics for teaching purposes at the Medical University of Vienna
Medical comics offer the possibility to address challenging situations within medical settings by using graphic illustrations. They can illustrate patient stories and as well address different perspectives of patients, caregivers or medical staff. At the Medical University of Vienna, three medical comics were used within an obligatory lecture for medical students. Thereby, the students got in touch with Medical Humanities and could reflect on sensitive topics first via an online platform followed by a discussion in the lecture hall. The integration of Medical Humanities into medical education served as a broad-based frame to address challenging aspects and was well accepted by medical students. As a result, an exhibition of medical comics called "IMPRESSION–EXPRESSION–INTERACTION – Perception in Medicine", that will be presented within this lecture, was organized and will take place at the Medical University of Vienna from October 2019 to January 2020. The exhibition will be divided into two areas. One part will contain an acquired exhibition from the Charité in Berlin called "Sick! Reclaiming Illness through Comics", the other part will contain the exhibition "Help! Help by using Medical Comics". Both areas are complemented by hands-on initiatives and self-reflection questions.
Eva Katharina Masel
Eva Katharina Masel, MD, PhD, MSc is working as a senior physician and deputy head at the division of palliative medicine, Department of Medicine I, Medical University of Vienna. Her main research focus is symptom management in patients suffering from incurable and progressive diseases. Her research focuses on palliative care of patients and families facing serious illnesses including psychosocial aspects and Medical Humanities. She has published several manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals.
Andrea Praschinger
Andrea Praschinger, Mag. Dr. is working at the Teaching Center, Medical University of Vienna. Her work focuses on clinical education within the curriculum of human medicine. Besides organizing clinical clerkships, her research focuses on clinical thinking and implementing new teaching strategies. Aside from her employment at the Medical University of Vienna, she is busy in history of medicine exploring the past of inpatient medical care.
Tempering the mind: humanist conceptions of music and mental health
This paper explores the influence of the humanist doctrine that music has the power to shape and condition the human soul on modern music therapy. For centuries scholars believed that just as two different strings can resonate in harmony, so the human body and soul might be brought into a state of perfect harmony. They compared the mind-body complex to two sympathetically vibrating strings on a musical instrument as they sought ways of conceptualising, diagnosing and restoring discordant ‘passions of the soul’ (emotions) into a well-tempered state of mind. In addition, they were convinced that individuals suffering from diseases such as melancholy and lovesickness would benefit from exposure to carefully selected pieces of music. From the seventeenth century onward, sympathetic vibration as a model for understanding the mind-body complex, mental disease, and the power of music has contributed to the development of new theories in biomedical, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences. However, whereas early modern scholars aimed at musically inducing a state of tranquillity of mind in which the emotions were controlled or even conquered, later scholars began to theorize about tempering the mind by music as a process focused on the peaceful coexistence of different emotions and thoughts. I argue that the model of sympathetic vibration is still being used today to justify the use of music in medical practices, in which almost in all cases the musical cure is supposed to be affected essentially by a kind of catharsis or purgation – a release of a pent-up kind of psychic energy, the constriction of which was the basic cause of the mental illness.
Jacomien Prins
Historian of philosophy and a historical musicologist. She joined Ca' Foscari University of Venice as an assistant professor in 2018. She is the author of Echoes of an Invisible World: Marsilio Ficino and Francesco Patrizi on Cosmic Order and Music Theory (2014) and Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on the Timaeus (forthcoming 2019), and editor of Sing Aloud Harmonious Sphe¬res: Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony (2017) and The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Wellbeing (2018). Her publications have ap-peared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, I Tatti Studies, Journal of Musicology, Music and Letters, Isis, The British Journal for the History of Science, and Early Science and Medicine.
Art and medicine: on the potentials of transdisciplinary encounters
It is possible to interrelate art and medicine in very different ways that can be enriching and enlightening for both fields of endeavor. By means of examples, the lecture will address forms of cross-disciplinary cooperation as well as the relevance and potentials of this boundary-opening joint exploration of approaches to problems and questions relative to research.
Part one will deal with images and aesthetic objects and ways in which they are embedded in a psychodynamic context, with particular emphasis on the role played by processes of genesis of aesthetic form and design in arriving at a reorientation – with art serving as a "transitory body”. Part two presents current research projects, in particular the PhD project undertaken by Barbara Graf, Stitches and Sutures, which deals with the representability of the perception of the body. She asks herself how subjective sensations can be made visible and artistically explores her own sensory disturbances caused by multiple sclerosis (MS). What role do references and precognition play in the representation process? What new insights can artistic research provide?
Barbara Putz-Plecko
Barbara Putz-Plecko is a visual artist and professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Since 2007 she has been Vice-Rector of the University, responsible for research and quality issues. She is Head of the Institute of Art and Cultural Studies and Art Education and Head of the Departments of Art and Communication Practices and Textiles. One of her main focuses has been on interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and transcultural artistic practices and the potentials of artistic strategies in inter- and transdisciplinary cooperations, communities and systems.
arbara Graf is an artist and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna/Textiles. In her work she investigates body representations and develops flexible sculptures as a second skin. The main media are drawing, sculpture, photography and film. Since 2004 she has been working in artistic research projects dealing with medical issues. She is currently developing her artistic doctoral thesis on the visualization of body perception.
"A picture of mine" – self-perception and design ideas in psychosis
In acute schizophrenic psychosis, the realistic perception of one's own self-image frequently is becoming distorted, being visibly reflected in pictorial representations. The designs themselves are expressed by a recreation of one's self-image, not only concerning the characteristics of the mental disorder, such as overemphasis of a particular physiognomic manifestation, but also the creative – often impressive – abilities of the patients. Arts therapy links to the patients' implicit knowledge about their disorder by directing towards their healthy and, hence, understanding parts. With this approach the lecture will deal.
Flora von Spreti
Professor h.c., artist (Akademie der Bildenden Künste München), graduated art therapist, honorary member of the Deutscher Fachverband für Kunst und Gestaltungstherapie, honorary member of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, creation of arts therapy at the Department of Psychiatry, Technical University of Munich, supervision, teaching therapist, teaching at Universities, Schools of Arts, and Colleges.
Novel literature: Flora von Spreti et al., Kunsttherapie bei Psychischen Störungen, Elsevier, München 2. Aufl. 2012, 3. Auflage in Bearbeitung; Flora von Spreti, et al., Kunsttherapie – Wege, Wirkung, Handwerk, Schattauer, Stuttgart 2018; and others.
Musiktherapie in der Neonatologie | Music Therapy in Neonatal Care
According to the Austrian Music Therapy Act, music therapy (MT) is defined as "independent, scientific, artistic, creative and expressive form of therapy" (§ 6, 1 MuthG). In 1959, the first European academic training course in MT was established in Vienna. In 2009, the Austrian Music Therapy Act came into effect. MT is administered in a broad spectrum of disorders and conditions, usually as additional treatment within a multi-approach model. The use of music as a medium of non-verbal communication is indicated for example in people who have limitations in the use of verbal communication (e.g. autism spectrum disorder, unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, dementia). Thus, MT has proven to be especially effective in neonatal care – both in babies and parents. In this talk we will provide an introduction to the clinical application of music therapy in neonatology. Furthermore, we will give an overview of the current research in the field. In addition, we will discuss preliminary results of an ongoing RCT comparing music therapy intervention and treatment as usual. This study is a cooperation between the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and the Vienna Medical University/Vienna General Hospital.
Leslie Schrage-Leitner
Leslie Schrage-Leitner is music therapist and Ph.D. student. She works as an outpatient music therapist for infants, toddlers, pre-school children, parent-child interaction and as an inpatient music therapist in neonatology. She is lecturer and teacher for music therapy in pediatrics and neonatology at the Universities of Music & Performing Arts Vienna and Graz/ Austria. In a joint research project of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, she is working on a dissertation on music therapy for premature babies at the Department of Neonatology of the Medical University of Vienna.
Thomas Stegemann
Thomas Stegemann, Univ.-Prof. Dr. med Dr. sc. mus., is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, licensed music therapist, and family therapist. He serves as Head of the Department of Music Therapy and the Music Therapy Research Centre Vienna (WZMF) at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria. Main research/teaching areas: neurobiology; ethics; music therapy with children, adolescents and families.
"There was still ink on the scalpel". Literary medicine
Fear and hope, grief and comfort, loneliness and social inclusion - the beautiful and the dark moments of life always belong together in medicine. It has always been, dealing with illness and death has not only dealt with medicine but also literature. And so it is not surprising that many physicians have also put on paper the intensive experiences that their profession brings with them every day. In my presentation, I will present my new book, in which I have compiled selected literary texts that give insight into the world of experience of patients, relatives, doctors and nurses. The varied anthology includes poems and excerpts from plays and novels by international medical literati from the 16th to the 21st century. Well-known authors such as Georg Büchner, Anton Chekhov, Samuel Shem, Malika Mokeddem or Tess Gerritsen can be found as well as one or the other new discovery.
Florian Steger
Since 1st of July 2016, Full Professor and Director of the Institute of the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine at Ulm University. Before that, since 2011, in the same function at the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. Chairman of the Research Ethics Committee at Ulm University. In 2014, Leibniz-Professor at the University of Leipzig. 2009–2014, member of the Junge Akademie at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and the German Academy of Naturalists Leopoldina. 2008, habilitation at the Medical Department of the University Erlangen-Nuremberg. 2003, Bavarian Habilitation Grant of the Bavarian Ministry for Science. 2002, PhD at the Ruhr-University Bochum. Studies of medicine, classical philology and history at the University of Würzburg and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University München. Scholarship holder and now liaison professor of the German National Academic Foundation. 2018 Medal "Universitatis Lodziensis Amico" by the Łódź University (Poland) and Honorary Professor at Semmelweis University, Budapest (Hungary). 2019 Professor at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University (Russia). 2019 Member of Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Main Research Fields: ancient medicine and its reception, medicine and arts, problems of in-justice in a politicized medicine, current ethical questions in medicine.
Florian Steger: There was still ink on the scalpel. Literary Medicine. Wiesbaden: marix publicshing house 2018.
Wien als Wiege der Kunsttherapie. Ein Blick zurück in die 1920er Jahre | Vienna as the cradle of art therapy. A look back at the 1920s
While most of the secondary literature places the beginnings of art therapy to the late 1940s and early 1950s, the lecture focuses primarily on the interwar period. At that time, a broad interest in the subject arose for the first time and the foundations for further development were laid. Taking Vienna as an example, where a new understanding of the social value of healthy bodies was formed under the buzzword "New Man", the paper will explore some steps aimed at adapting findings from modern art pedagogy for therapeutic purposes. In the lecture, special attention will be paid to the multisensory and especially tactile art experience – a subject which was widely discussed around 1920 and which was hoped to have a healing effect.
Georg Vasold
Art historian who currently works for the Wien Museum. He has taught and researched at the University of Vienna, the Freie Universität Berlin, and most recently at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. His research focuses on art historiography, especially from the period around 1900 and the 1920s.
>Bis zur Unendlichkeit und noch viel weiter< Der literarische Blick auf den entgrenzten Menschen | >To infinity and beyond< Literature’s view on human’s dissolution of boundary
The planned presentation addresses the interdependence of literature and life science. The literary adaptation of medico-technical phenomena and as a consequence thereof the overcoming of the human condition will be central based on two exemplifying novels.
Novelists of the twenty-first century increasingly address the biological boundary crossing of their protagonists. This on the hand takes place due to the incorporation of biotechnology. The protagonist Duane Fitzgerald of Andreas Eschbach’s novel "Der Letzte seiner Art" (2003) receives expensively-implanted prostheses that supply him with superhuman powers and help him in his work as an elite soldier. He fails to go into action due to incompatibilities between the human-machine interactions hence reducing him to the rank of an anti-hero.
The striving for dissolution of boundaries is on the other hand addressed by means of external influences of biotechnological procedures. In the novel "Zero K" (2016), Don DeLillo tells the story of billionaire Ross Lockhart, who would like to cryoconserve his terminally ill girl-friend hoping for a cure in the future. The temporal limitation of human life should hence be fooled.
Biotechnological enhancement interventions – whether endogenous or exogenous – have the aspect of dissolution of boundaries in common in such scenarios. This holds true in terms of cor¬poreality as well as mortality (transhumanism). It is on rare occasions that protagonists do not have to grapple with serious repercussions. Literature provides hypothetical answers to the question what might be happening if human’s dissolution of boundary would be conquerable. Literature therewith encourages the recipients to reflect on biotechnological op-tions of solution on human existence referring to modern medicine, without judging them per se.
Christiane Vogel
Alumna of the masters program American Studies (2013) of the University of Leipzig as well as the masters program Medicine-Ethics-Law (2014) of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU). She is employed as a research assistant at the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine at the MLU since 2014. Here, she is also a member of the Ethics Committee at the adjoining University Hospital of Halle since 2016. Her research focusses on medicine and literature (Medical Humanities) with emphasis on contemporary literature, developments in biomedicine, ethical and legal aspects of organ donation and –allocation, medical ethics, and ethics counselling.
Jointly organized by the Medical University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Science
Committee of the Conference: Wolfgang Schütz, Felicitas Seebacher, Helmut Denk, Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, Hermann Hunger