Preliminary Programme

At one stage of remove from the clinical encounter, the dynamic relationship between the public and institutions of medicine was worked out in negotiated perceptions of medical research. Behind common fears of what it was to come under the purview of a doctor, either through disease, or as a surgical patient, lay the spectre of the medical experimenter, whose surgical skills and physiological, pathological and toxicological knowledge were wrought from unchecked experimentation on animals. At the end of the nineteenth century in the United States, building on campaigns in England and in Germany, a strongly female-led anti-vivisectionist movement had painted a monstrous picture of medical scientists, alarming citizens and would-be patients of the dangers of falling into the hands of doctors. The response, a carefully orchestrated defence of medical research launched under the auspices of the American Medical Association, sought to subvert this movement by staging a public education campaign that would change the relationship between the public and the medical establishment. At the heart of this campaign was an explicit targeting of women, through organizations and popular women’s magazines, in an attempt to convey the humane object of medical experimentation and thereby humanise the medical profession. This appeal generally took the form of a specific and tightly constructed deployment of a concept of secular mercy, undermining religious objections to experimentation on the grounds of cruelty, demonstrating a clear perception of the medical patient as human subject, and preserving a notion of gentlemanliness in medical research. This paper explores the medical establishment’s strategic manipulation of this gender-emotional dynamic. (Show less)

The title of this paper is inspired by the chapter title of K. Browne and P. Freeling’s The Doctor-Patient Relationship (1967). Both physicians are known for their studies on this kind of relationship and there were considered very influential in their time.
The presentation is part of a larger project on trust, from an emotional perspective (Nussbaum 1990, 1994, 2001; Baier 1995), in the relational character of the clinical practice. Trust, central to the doctor-patient relationship, is itself an interpersonal act and implies sociability because trust finds its fulfillment in another, in our case, a health professional, a community of professionals or a health institution. This presentation analyzes emotional trust in the professionals of health-patients relationships, through narratives of patients and physicians in the 1960s (Barnes, Balint, Browne, Freeling). There is substantial medical literature on the therapeutic character of the doctor-patient relationship that, furthermore, has contributed to build the contemporary approach to this relationship.
In these sources I will focus on the links between trust, confidence and reliance. The questions I will raise include queries on the temporal dimension of trust: can we base our trust in a health professional on past experiences? Might trust lead to future situations or relationships? Could we affirm that, in a health relationship, trust is creative because it produces more trust (Steinbock, 2014)? I will also analyze the bond between trust and vulnerability and the relationship between trust and commitment between a doctor and his or her patient and family.
I will also discuss possible reasons the loss of trust described in Medicine and in health relationships (Illich 1977), or in the confrontation between autonomy and medical paternalism, introduced at the end of the twentieth century. (Show less)

Many studies have investigated the First World War's subject, but some questions about intimate life in wartime still persist nowadays, particularly those regarding women's emotions during the conflict. This study intends to delve into the emotional worlds of First World War's nurses through the analysis of their personal letters and diaries, engaging with the configuration of emotions in exceptional norms and social interactions. These documents and experiences provide us some fresh insights on a familiar conflict and highlight the reality of war experiences that are often left out of consideration. This study will analyze intensively the emotions of these women both by confronting their letters and diaries, which will allow us to emphasize the gender relations that were generated with their patients. (Show less)

Florence Nightingale’s Letters from the Crimea, which she wrote during her mission leading a group of thirty-eight nurses at the Hospital of Scutari during the Crimean War (1853-6), have been extensively studied as the origins of modern nursing. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to exploring Nightingale’s correspondence as a “humanitarian narrative” (Laqueur, 1989), in which the detailed descriptions of soldiers’ suffering evoke readers’ compassion as a kind of moral imperative leading to action, in the same manner as in Henri Dunant’s A Memory from Solferino (1864).
By combining Gender Studies and Emotion History, this paper seeks to show how Nightingale’s narrative renewed the meaning of compassion while associating this capacity of feeling other’s suffering and to relieve it with a set of caring practices, which she defined as an exclusively female competence. For Nightingale, to eradicate soldiers’ suffering was a task that should be performed by women by supervising their diet, cleaning their beds, as well as exposing them to fresh air and natural light. Thus, compassion became a hygienic practice in Nightingale’s letters, a way of combatting diseases such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery.
The focus on the practical dimension of Nightingale’s conception of compassion allows, furthermore, the analysis of the caring process as an asymmetric relation established between the nurse and the patient that has strong gendered implications. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Nightingale shaped throughout her letters a conception of female compassionate care, which provided women with an agency while healing broken masculinities, such as those represented by the British soldiers who suffered the horrors of the Crimean War.
Dolores Martín Moruno is a medical historian based at the Institute for Ethics, History and the Humanities at the University of Geneva. She has widely published on the role of women as war nurses and on the history of emotions, paying particular attention to the pathological aspects of love, as well as to the different experiences associated with pain, such as resentment and compassion. Her current research project Those women who performed humanitarian action: a gendered history of compassion from the Franco-Prussian to WWII has been awarded in 2017 with a Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship. (Show less)