MH&B Lecture Series

Our faculty presents weekly lectures during The Graduate School's Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters every Thursday from noon to 12:50pm in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie building. Due to public interest, we have made these lectures open to all, inside and outside the Northwestern community. Please feel free to bring a lunch. Beginning this year, we are recording these lectures and making them available online. These recordings are playable in iTunes and include the presentation slides in sync with the audio. More information is available here. Key to recording symbols: Available Will be available soon Will not be made available (More information)

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Apprehension and Medicine

"Apprehension" means both cognitive grasp ("to apprehend x") and fearful anticipation ("to be apprehensive about x"). These three lectures will consider the inaccessibility of the body (we can't see inside it; we can't see the microscopic creatures that inhabit it), and our ways of imagining and representing the bodily things we worry about because we cannot watch them closely. Biomedical science has given us technologies for looking at internal organs and microscopic pathogens; here we will explore the role of narrative as another kind of medical technology, one that should collaborate with medicine to better apprehend our bodies and the scary things that may or may not be happening inside them.
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Swimming in the Dark: Embodiment and Apprehension ?
Thursday, September 27 · Baldwin Auditorium in Lurie

What does it mean that we have limited perceptual and cognitive access to what is most intimate to us, the inside of our bodies? This lecture considers the limitations of the visual and the advantages of narrative in imagining and representing the experience of anxious embodiment.
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Apprehending the Subcutaneous ?
Thursday, October 4 · Gray Seminar Room in Lurie

This lecture compares filmed and written fictions set inside the body with the access offered by medical imaging technology. What can stories contribute to medicine's efforts at illuminating our insides?
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Apprehending Microbes ?
Thursday, October 11 · Gray Seminar Room in Lurie

This lecture considers how we imagine and represent infection and resistance, and the implications of a "narrative epidemiology" that unsettles human perspectives on disease. We end the series by considering what connections between narrative and apprehension might mean for the humanities' place in medicine.