1.30 pm
Coffee, Registration & Popup Museum
The Museum of Medicine and Health, part of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, presents a selection of objects representing the history of healthcare and medical education in Manchester.
Interact with collections and learn more about the role of the museum today and future plans for engagement. Find out more from Heritage Officer, Stephanie Seville during the event breakouts.
2.00 pm
The Annual General Meeting of the Section of Psychiatry will take immediately prior to the symposium to formally elect new Office bearers and members of Council
2.05 pm
Looking Back to look forward: The case of eating disorders
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS OF Dr Jane Whittaker, retired Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist
Outline of talk:
Bodies are strange things. We all have one, and how much its physical state defines us varies with age, gender, sickness, and the culture we inhabit. What we can say is that our bodily form influences how others see us. Plato asserted that beauty was virtue, and virtue was beauty (or beautiful?). In our times personality attributions are still made about those of us who are robustly built, disfigured, or deformed. This is often internalised, for good or ill, by us, and sometimes has consequences that involve psychiatry.
A famous psychiatrist once asserted that “physicians look after carcases, but psychiatrists look after people’s souls”. I would argue that there are others better qualified to attend to souls. However, we will hear in this talk and from the other talks in this seminar about whether psychiatry is understood as being about disorders of mind or brain, or both? Psychiatrists are having to become increasingly attuned to their patients’ bodies, because of the toxicity of drugs we use and because of an increasing interest in how bodies, brains and minds interact.
This is especially the case for eating disorder psychiatry where we are attentive to our patient’s beliefs about their bodies, as well as the consequences of food restriction and excess on their bodies. Refusing to take enough nutrition in times when this is available or eating too much to the point of disabling obesity has an historical and cultural context. In this talk we explore historical understanding of self-starvation and trace its patterns from ancient ascetic practices to the modern drive for the ideal body, and from the practice of communally sanctioned fasting to the notion of disorder. Setting this in the context of eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa, helps us think about how we understand self-starvation in the past, the ways we manage patients today, and how future psychiatrists may judge how we are doing.
2.45 pm
Locating the Trance in Transference: Hypnotism’s Contributions to Psychotherapy
Dr Gordon Bates, Consultant Child Psychiatrist and writer. He edits the ‘Narrative Matters’ section of the journal Child and Adolescent Mental Health.
Outline of talk:
Hypnotism’s significant contribution to psychotherapy is largely forgotten or unrecognised by most, despite the scholarship of the medical psychotherapist and historian Henri Ellenberger. The story of the rise of hypnotic psychotherapeutics in Britain was scarcely covered in his The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) and is even less known. This talk will remedy this deficit and resurrect the key names of Charles Lloyd Tuckey and John Milne Bramwell, Britain’s premier medical hypnotists who worked at the turn of the twentieth century. They managed to legitimise the technique despite its unfortunate links to stage magic, automatic obedience and quackery. I will demonstrate the links between hypnotism and subsequent forms of talking cure as they emerged and developed over the century. Despite this flowering of the various schools of psychotherapy from analysis to CBT, none has been shown to be better than its rivals or predecessors. Medical history is often depicted as an inexorable march of scientific progress but the historical reality is much more complex and interesting.
Learning Objectives:
- To gain an overview of the different types of modern and historical psychotherapy.
- To understand the role of hypnosis in the evolution of talking therapies.
- To explore the common features of successful talking therapies.
3.25 pm
Coffee & Popup Museum
4.00 pm
Anatomy, Electricity, Heredity, and the Neurochemical Self: Mental illness and medical science since circa 1800
Professor Carsten Timmerman, Professor of History of Science, Technology & Medicine, Director, Centre for the History of Science, Technology & Medicine (CHSTM) and Academic Lead, Museum of Medicine and Health
Outline of talk:
In this lecture Professor Timmerman will discuss how understandings of the mind and mental illness have become biomedical since the early nineteenth century. Historians of science and medicine have studied extensively how the emergence of new institutions, such as the modern teaching hospital or the laboratory, as well as the material conditions under which medical professionals and patients interacted, have informed medical knowledge. Medicine became biomedicine. When it came to understanding the mind and mental illness, this meant a mostly futile search for brain lesions explaining mental illness in light of growing knowledge about brain anatomy, an interest in animal experiments focusing on brain function, informed by the new science of experimental physiology, and a pessimistic obsession with genetic decline in light of debates about evolution and degeneration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The therapeutic impact of these new biomedical understandings of the mind was very limited, until in the first half of the twentieth century psychiatrists turned their attention to a range of increasingly drastic interventions, which raised serious ethical concerns. He will conclude the lecture with reflections on Nikolas Rose’s proposal that since the 1950s we have been living in the era of what he terms the neurochemical self. He will suggest that we may want to be as sceptical about some of the claims regarding the specificity of pharmaceutical interventions as we now are about the promises of psychosurgery.
Learning Objectives:
The lecture will provide those attending with:
- An overview of the history of biomedical interpretations of the mind and mental illness
- A discussion of some of the problematic and controversial ethical issues that this history raises
- An introduction to the historiography on these issues