How medicine is practiced is largely determined by culture. An interdisciplinary field called Medical Humanities has developed at the interface medicine - humanities and social sciences, as well as at the interface medicine - the arts.
This international conference, jointly organized by the Medical University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has its general focus on the interactions between medicine and the arts, but will also deal more specifically with how medicine is reflected in visual/applied arts, music, literature/media and vice versa. In treating illness, there is a growing movement towards considering the link between mind, body and soul and incorporating the arts into medical curricula in order to stimulate empathic behavior in students and, hence, to sharpen their clinical observation skills.
Hospitals and medical consulting rooms are becoming increasingly global places with cross-cultural patients and different religious influences, ways of dealing with death and attitudes to the separation of body and soul, so that subjective disease concepts have to be kept in mind.
- 11. October
Morning: Medicine and Visual/Applied Arts
Afternoon: Medicine and Music - 12 October
Morning: Medicine and Literature/Media
In addition, there will be two Keynote Lectures given by Jane Macnaughton (Durham University, U.K.) and Dietrich von Engelhardt (Universität Lübeck).