Themed Roundtables offer scholars across different disciplines听the opportunity to engage in depth with a single theme of contemporary interest. The format typically involves short presentations from three invitees, followed by an open-floor discussion among the speakers and the audience, moderated by a member of the SSoM department. Roundtables are open to both the university community and the wider public.
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Roundtable, November 27, 2024
2:30 鈥� 5:00 Faculty Council Room (M48)
Strathcona Anatomy and Dentistry Building
3640 Rue University
Collections of Human Remains in the Medical Museum: Problematic Pasts, Challenging Futures
With Dominic Hall (Harvard, Warren Anatomical Museum), Catherine Turgeon (McGill, Redpath Museum), Richard Fraser (McGill, Maude Abbott Medical Museum), and Hugo Rueda (McGill, Social Studies of Medicine)
Description
鈥淭he medical museum is dead. Long live the medical museum.鈥�
This provocative phrase, coined by scholars Ken Arnold and Simon Chaplin in 2013, encapsulates the multifaceted debates surrounding medical museums and the ethical implications of collecting, safeguarding, and displaying human remains. On the one hand, it acknowledges the necessity of moving beyond the traditional medical museum, which often collected specimens without consent and contributed to problematic racial and eugenic narratives. On the other, it emphasizes the transformative potential of these institutions in contemporary contexts, particularly in the realms of decolonization, decentralization, and democratization.
The reimagined or "post-medical museum," as described by Arnold and Chaplin, faces significant challenges. Just as there is much to be done, there is also much to be undone. In this light, the ethical considerations of displaying human remains demand urgent and thoughtful discussion. Is it appropriate to exhibit what was once a person in the same way one would display an object? Do the scientific, educational, or aesthetic benefits justify the sometimes controversial origins of these collections? What are the potential futures for these collections, and how should they serve medical professionals and students, scholars, educators, and the public?
The Department of Social Studies of Medicine seeks to address these and other pivotal questions through an interdisciplinary gathering comprising scholars, curators, and practitioners. In the form of a roundtable, this event aims to facilitate a discussion that critically examines the ethical implications of collecting and displaying human remains in museums while strategizing concrete actions to address these issues.
huma_remains_roundtable_poster_final.pdf
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Roundtable, April 02, 2025
2:30 - 5:00 PM, 3647 Peel Room 101
Place and Psyche
With Elena Vogman (Bauhaus-Universit盲t, Weimar), Coline Fournout (McGill, Anthropology), Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (Cornell University), Ramzi Nimr (McGill, Anthropology), and Todd Meyers (Moderator: McGill, Social Studies of Medicine)
Description
The Place and Psyche roundtable is an opportunity to explore the experiential, conceptual, cultural, and political intertwining of place and psyche. Through specific cases, the roundtable is aimed at fostering a discussion that might locate the psyche beyond the interior world of the individual. Here, place is more than a set of external conditions that impact and shape interiority: place and psyche are intertwined and productive of one another.
But how the relationship between psyche and place has been understood in different therapeutic approaches, using psychoth茅rapie institutionnelle in France as but one example in the mid-twentieth century, raises basic questions about the dimensions of these concepts and the operative definitions of therapy itself. What could it mean for a place to feel, think, want, heal, or grieve? By extension, the roundtable will explore notions of atmosphere and ambience to think the psychic consistency of a place. The roundtable is a chance to explore the porous relationships of psyche and the environment, to imagine conscious and unconscious topographies, and to question how selves are done and undone through the spatialization of the psyche inside and outside therapeutic contexts.