Photograph by Laura Stevens

Medical Humanities and the Arts: Self-Portrait without Breasts

The College of Humanities and the University’s Arts and Culture Team are delighted to announce a collaborative event which brings together a poet, a photographer, a medical practitioner, a writer and psychologist, a cultural historian and a literary critic to explore the issue of preventative medicine, cancer and our perceptions about the body. 

The evening event is sponsored by the University of Exeter’s Medical Humanities strand of the new Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) Strategy, the College of Humanities and the Arts and Culture Team.

Host for the event Dr Andy Brown, Director of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter explains: “The evening will open a dialogue about the relationship between arts and medicine, addressing issues surrounding cancer and preventative surgery and exploring perceptions about our bodies and their purposes.”

Visiting poet Clare Best will recite from her publication Excisions, which was nominated for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry for 2012. The central sequence of the collection, Self-portrait without Breasts, is inspired by her own journey through preventative double mastectomy.

A panel will follow with Dr Corinna Wagner, Department of English at the University of Exeter, (author of Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Politics), writer and psychologist Professor Janet Reibstein, Department of Psychology at the University of Exeter (author of Staying Alive: A Family Memoir) and, Dr James Mackay from University College London (who is the only accredited UK Consultant Medical Oncologist specialising in clinical cancer genetics).

The panel will consider how language and image can be used to represent individual experience with surgery and bodily modifications and specifically how the experience of choosing to undergo a preventive bilateral mastectomy can be communicated. They will discuss how doctors and patients have dealt with breast cancer and the threat of this disease in the past. Participants will be encouraged to question what art can offer medical practitioners and those who deal with radical changes to their bodies.

This will be followed by a lively audience discussion and question and answer period, a wine reception and an exhibition of stunning photographs of Clare Best’s project, taken by Laura Stevens.

Event Details

This event takes place on Tuesday 27 November 2012 at 18:30 in Lecture Theatre 1, Queen’s Building, Streatham Campus, University of Exeter and will be followed by an exhibition and wine reception at 20:00 in The Forum.

The event is free and open to all (no need to register). Should you wish to find out more information about the event please contact Dr Corinna Wagner, c.m.wagner@exeter.ac.uk

This event is sponsored by the University of Exeter’s Medical Humanities strand of the new Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) Strategy, the College of Humanities and the Arts and Culture Team.

Date: 7 November 2012

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