Dr. John Hoberman discusses racial bias in the practice of medicine and medical education
By John Carranza
How has the Western legacy that divides human beings into distinct racial categories affected the practice of medicine in the U.S.? Today’s secular classification of race is grounded in the study of human anatomy. In the late 19th-century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor of medicine, measured a variety of human skulls, from which he ascertained five racial classifications: Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. The simultaneous colonization of the Americas, driving and driven by these racial classifications, solidified the privileging of white colonists over colonized populations, engendering a racial folklore of white superiority that has been handed down through generations.
Alan Friedman, Ph.D. and Craig Hurwitz, MD advocate for palliative care in HI’s Faculty Fellows Seminar on Health, Well-Being, Healing
By Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley
Death-bed scene, figures crowd around a dying person’s bed in grief while final rites are being read. Stipple engraving by N. Schiavonetti, 1812, after R. Westall.
How have medical advances over the long 20th century altered the ways western cultures represent illness, death, and dying? Before the turn of the 20th century, people living in North America and Britain commonly confronted death in their own homes. The bed was often the site not only of conception and birth but of death as well. The dead and dying were familiar, commonplace, and domestic, and, consequently, the practices and rituals associated with death and dying were typically supervised by women, who commanded the domestic sphere. Yet rapidly-changing advances in science and medicine over the course of the 20th century have dramatically altered our experiences and perception of death. Geoffrey Gorer argues in his essay, “The Pornography of Death,” that death has replaced sex as the ultimate taboo in the United States and the United Kingdom; it has become sanitized and discrete from our everyday lives. Medical doctors who were once mostly helpless at best or harmful at worst to the sick, have become, with medical advances, newly able to intervene in illness and promote healing. Continue reading The Sanitization of Death and Dying→
Ann Hamilton reflects on the evolution of her public art works in HI’s Faculty Fellows Seminar on Health, Well-Being, Healing
By Clare Callahan
O N E E V E R Y O N E by Ann Hamilton
Last week’s Humanities Institute Faculty Fellows Seminar on “Health, Well-Being, Healing” hosted internationally recognized visual artist Ann Hamilton to speak on O N E E V E R Y O N E, a public art project commissioned by Landmarks for the Dell Medical School. O N E E V E R Y O N E opened on January 27, and Hamilton was in Austin for the opening. Hamilton’s O N E E V E R Y O N E, as Landmarks describes the project, “is framed by the idea that human touch and intimacy are the most essential means of contact and the fundamental expression of physical care. More than 500 participants in several Austin locations were photographed through a semi-transparent membrane that sharply focused parts of the body that made contact with the material and softly blurred the parts that moved away from it. The optical quality of the material renders touch—something felt, more than seen—visible.”
