The Patient 2008 Call for Papers

The patient occupies a liminal, unstable position, precariously situated between home and hospital, work and bed, life and death. Although attended by doctors, nurses, family and friends, her condition—particularly if it is chronic—threatens to sever her connections with the world and to exile her into that fundamental solitude owned by the sick and suffering.
Immersed in a medical system that seeks optimum outcomes with zero errors, the patient receives care delivered with industrial efficiency. Advances in diagnostic and therapeutic modalities provide both cure and control of chronic illness not imagined a decade ago. The patient, then, poised to benefit on multiple fronts, should be increasingly satisfied with the medical encounter; yet many patients feel alienated or even violated by the medical system. Many health care professionals also lament weaknesses in their technology-driven profession.
What defines a quality medical encounter from the patient’s perspective? What do medical practitioners—nurses, physicians, social workers—value in their relationship with the patient? How is this relationship preserved and nurtured? What are the opportunities or perils in the physician-patient relationship?
It seems timely to counteract the quantification of the patient by the health care industry and to call for a humanistic reconstitution of the patient’s experience and situation—to reconsider, rethink, and empathically re-imagine the patient in her environments, ancient and contemporary, intimate and social. We invite papers from a wide range of perspectives—humanist, medical, artistic—addressing one or more of the following topics:

the patient in literary contexts
the patient in film
the patient in self-help books and pathographies
the dying patient
the identity of the patient
from person to patient
the patient and communication
the ill and the well
the chronic patient
the caregiver
the quality medical encounter from the perspective of the patient
the quality medical encounter from the perspective of the physician
biomedical ethics
the patient in the history of medicine
the patient in medical anthropology and sociology
patient empowerment

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 20th June 2008. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be developed and submitted by Friday 10th October 2008. The draft paper should be of no more than 8 or 9 pages long and ready for a 20 minute (maximum) presentation during the conference.

If interested in participating, 300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. A short cv (maximum of 2 pages) should also be sent as a separate document.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper or panel proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Committee
Kimberly R. Myers Associate Professor Department of Humanities Penn State College of Medicine Milton S. Hershey Medical Center 500 University Drive Hershey, PA 17033 E-Mail: Kimberly R Myers	Harold Schweizer John P. Crozer Professor of English Department of English Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837 E-Mail: Harold Schweizer	Rob Fisher Network Founder and Leader Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom E-Mail: Rob Fisher

The conference is part of the ‘Persons’ research projects, which in turn belong to the ‘Probing the Boundaries’ programmes of ID.Net. We aim to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore innovative and challenging routes of intellectual and academic exploration. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.

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