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Podcast: Trinity Long Room Hub Podcasts
Episode: The Social Life of Medical Anecdotes
Description: Recorded November 7th, 2024.
A hybrid seminar by Dr Brian Hurwitz (Emeritus Professor of Medicine and the Arts at the Centre for the Humanities and Health, King’s College London) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.
Abstract:
Medicine is strewn with anecdotes, brief, pointed accounts of human episodes, drawn from scattered zones of healthcare experience. Traditionally viewed as a short form medical discourse which encompasses case reports, aphorisms, witticisms and hybridised versions of such texts and utterances, some are artfully fashioned micro-narratives, others ‘twitchily alive’ observations and dialogues. Frequently dismissed as epistemologically doubtful if not misleading frippery, he appro...