HAPSAT Graduate Workshops - Fourth Winter Session

HAPSAT GRADUATE WORKSHOPS

"Medical Semiotics and Narrative Medicine: The Doctor and Patient as a Text"

In-person event -Wednesday May 07- 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

VC303

Abstract: The separation of medicine from biology, as fields of study, can be messy. Furthermore, the field that we understand as medicine has burgeoned into an industry unto itself. Since the turn of the millennium, new medical modalities have emerged, whereby the patient is reimagined in terms of narrative. 

There is also evidence that physicians as a group tend to lose empathy for those they treat. This empathy loss is measurable and can be traced to the way that physicians are trained and the fact that physicians are their own small society. Some remedies for this loss of empathy have been suggested such as “patient centred care”, “narrative medicine” and “narrative based medicine” however, despite the idea that the patient must be centred, each of these modalities is about the physician.   

In my talk I address the idea of narrative in medical practice and query the manner is the patient both read and written by the physician using semiotic theory as a framework. I will also explore the idea of authorship in relation to the manner in which physicians "read" or diagnose the patient, using the ideas of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, to complicate the idea of writer and author in the doctor and patient relationship.

Graduate Workshop Organizer: Alexandra Calzavara