Our Purpose
The recent surge of inquiry into the intersection of medical practice and medical education has led to new interdisciplinary collaborations between scholars and practitioners of both medicine and culture. Medical Humanities programs have sprung up across the nation, including SUNY Stonybrook, Stanford, and Yale, and internationally, at Hong Kong University, Durham, University of Glasgow and many other locations. Despite this recent groundswell of interest, however, the field itself has reached a certain maturity: The British Medical Journal’s prestigious Medical Humanities journal is now in its 39th year.
The University of Florida has a rich resource of scholars in departments as varied as English, History, Women’s Studies, Anthropology, Psychology, Law, Art, Engineering, Philosophy, Computer Science, and Statistics who are interested in interdisciplinary work on medicine and culture. Albert Brick Professor of English Dr. Pamela Gilbert, Shands clinical faculty member Dr. Paulette Hahn and Nina Stoyan-Rosenzwieg of the Health Science Center Library have found that many faculty at the College of Medicine are interested in integrating input from scholars outside of medicine into the clinical and educational process. However, the sheer size of UF, while offering advantages in sheer numbers of talented participants, has sometimes made finding those in other departments of UF difficult. We therefore collaborated to create a new collective, the Collective for Interdisciplinary Scholarship on Medicine and Culture (CISMaC). We hope this website will form a locus for communication and discussion across departmental boundaries.
The main purpose for this site is to facilitate projects that transcend disciplinary barriers and connect medical study with other fields, promoting work on the history of medicine, literature and medicine, medicine and the arts, health and ethics, intersections of health and gender, ethnicities and race, and, ideally, new inquiries not yet imaginable.
Please feel free to explore the profiles of faculty involved in the collective, and to post relevant announcements to our projects page. Watch this space for events to come. Interested participants who would like to post a profile are invited to submit a profile including name, contact information, areas of scholarly interest, and any relevant publications to pgilbert@ufl.edu. Notifications of current or upcoming projects may also be sent to this address.
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