Spring 2019

As a set of disciplines, the humanities face the challenge of how to write about embodied experiences that resist easy verbal categorization such as illness, pain, and healing. The recent emergence of interdisciplinary frameworks such as narrative medicine has offered a set of methodological approaches to address these challenges. Conceptualizing a field of medical humanities provides a broad umbrella under which to study the influence of medico-scientific ideas and practices on society.  Whether by incorporating material culture such as medical artefacts, performing symptomatic readings of poems and novels, or excavating the implicit medical assumptions underlying auditory cultures, the approaches that emerge from a historiographical or interpretive framework are different from those coming from the physician’s black bag. This two-day workshop will continue the work of the Explorations in the Medical Humanities lecture series from 2017-2018, with a new emphasis on creating an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars from a variety of institutions. 

Lipstick Lobotomy imagines the playwright’s great aunt Ginny and JFK’s little sister Rosemary Kennedy meeting at an exclusive high-end sanitarium for women in the fall of 1941. Ginny is desperate to be friends with the charismatic and stylish Rosemary and is not satisfied with the talk therapy at the Institute and pressures her doctors for more aggressive treatment. Meanwhile, Rosemary, forced into the institute by her famous family because of her intellectual disability, keeps trying to escape. Their friendship blossoms as Ginny tirelessly pursues increasingly aggressive medical intervention.