Preliminary Programme

In recent decades, much has been said about the methodological challenges and tactics of interviewing groups of "elite" physicians and scientists, e.g. with regard to witness seminars and video podcasts with renowned scientists. At the university level, too, there is a large number of semi-structured online interviews by historians with alumni and emeriti, which are intended to present and contextualise scientific (local) highlights in medicine. Such material is often presented on university websites as a supplement to lists of medical school "milestones".
Drawing on the publications and questionnaires of oral history projects on excellence in medicine, this presentation will first provide an overview of current such initiatives with a focus on universities in Northern Europe.
Afterwards, the first results of an ongoing interview project of the scientific network "Bridging the Baltic: Medicine in the Baltic Sea Region", which investigates how authority and prestige play out in an institutional setting, will be presented. Central to this is the question of self-assessment and self-presentation of scientific excellence in national and international research contexts, especially under the specific conditions of knowledge exchange in the Cold War era and the subsequent reorganisation of the European scientific landscape. Finally, we will propose to launch a platform with European colleagues for comparative research on this topic (Show less)

With today’s requirements to scientific communication, conducted research and the results and conclusions thereof have often to be presented to a broader public beyond the scientific community. Thus, researchers must take into consideration not only scientific views but also communicative aspects. Planning oral history interviews with people in sensitive areas such as homes for mentally impaired people, the interviewer faces a great number of legal, ethical, communicative, technical, and aesthetic challenges before the “stories” may be published on websites or even social media platforms.
This contribution is based mainly on my experience with an oral history project commissioned and funded by a private social institution for mentally handicapped people. The institution is proud of the profound changes, it has undergone in its 140 years of existence. The project aimed to document the more recent past of the current residents and their lives, but also included a communication to the outside world subject to adhering to the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.
The presentation will show the methodological and practical approaches used to meet the requirements for scientific and historical information gathering as well as taking extraordinary care of the highly confidential aspects protecting the protagonists in sensitive surroundings. The paper tries to shed a special light on the practical, ethical and legal aspects of conducting interviews with people with legal guardians, and the challenge of producing informative and entertaining but still respectful video content from these interviews. And it should set off a debate on whether – in a scientific view – both objectives, historical and communicative, may reasonably be met by the described method. (Show less)

In recent years, the spectrum of (medical) historical studies on the placement of children and adolescents in homes and psychiatric institutions has expanded considerably. Current studies focus in particular on the everyday lives and experiences of people with mental or psychological impairments who were housed in long-term institutions isolated from the outside world until well into the 1970s. The research interest here concentrates primarily on questions of restrictions on personal rights of freedom, forms of economic exploitation as well as coercion and violence in everyday institutional life.
In order to capture the perspective and individual experiences of those affected, oral history methods are now increasingly being used. When conducting narrative interviews with mentally impaired people, however, constellations of conversations arise that raise very specific methodological and research ethics questions in several respects. On a legal as well as ethical level, the question of securing informed consent from eyewitnesses arises. With regard to medical aspects, possible impairments, e.g. as a result of many years of medication, must be considered, as well as the very different individual characteristics of cognition and communication. In the concrete interview situation, this results not only in methodological challenges of a possible communicative adaptation to individual needs. They are also closely connected with ethical questions, such as the avoidance of communicative hierarchies and possible retraumatisation of the interview partners.
The article sheds light on these special constellations of conversations based on concrete eyewitness interviews conducted within the framework of research projects of the "Institute for History, Theory and Ethics of Medicine" Düsseldorf. The experiences and methodological questions made here are also discussed comparatively in the context of similar oral history projects.

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Biographical research approaches can be applied to numerous fields. In the field of medical history, biographical research approaches confront researchers with special questions that arise from the interweaving of practical research considerations with medical ethical conventions.
In addition to interviewing actors of elite medicine as well as members of vulnerable groups, eyewitness projects deal with the perspective of professional actors from the field and their expert knowledge. But even if it is a question of surveying professional expertise and everyday medical clinical and research life, the special features of the research field are to be considered, such as the special relationship of trust in a doctor-patient relationship, the handling of sensitive information, ...
Thus, in research in medicine, some special features have to be considered in order to protect the actors involved and their data on the one hand and not to withhold the advantages of this research approach on the other.
Not least in view of the increasingly far-reaching digital analysis possibilities offered by technological change, it is necessary to discuss to what extent and how long a relationship of responsibility lasts. Experiences of previous projects (including the project on the history of psychiatry, human genetics, medical child protection) show that, for example, transparency in how personal data and histories are handled is a prerequisite for many respondents to participate in research projects at all.
Against this background, this article highlights and discusses questions about the methodological, ethical and legal issues, resulting from oral data collection in the field.
Not least in view of the increasingly far-reaching digital analysis possibilities offered by technological change, it is necessary to discuss to what extent and how long a relationship of responsibility lasts. Experiences of previous projects (including the project on the history of psychiatry, human genetics, medical child protection) show that, for example, transparency in how personal data and histories are handled is a prerequisite for many respondents to participate in research projects at all. (Show less)