Shame and Medical History Seminar Series

The Shame and Medicine Project in collaboration with the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter, will run a seminar series over the next few years which will examine shame and stigma in the context of medical history.

Seminars are hybrid events and will take place on Thursdays from 2-3.30 GMT.

Upcoming seminars:

• 15th May 2025, Dr Mara Pieri (University of Coimbra) – ONLINE ONLY

TITLE: Shame, pride, and all the invisible things: the emotions regulating access to healthcare.

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the centrality of emotions in the experience of accessing healthcare for LGBTQ+ people. Based on qualitative interviews conducted with LGBTQ+ people in Portugal for the project “DIVERS – Diversity and Inclusion in Healthcare”, the paper discusses how access to healthcare is mediated by emotional responses and how such emotions influence the quality of the relationships between LGBTQ+ patients and healthcare providers. Literature on access to healthcare often points out that LGBTQ+ people tend to show scarce compliance to screening programs and low access to non-urgent healthcare treatments (Seelman et al. 2017; Zeeman et al. 2014). Data collected during the emphasize the importance of considering emotions as drivers of the decisions that regulate how and to what extent LGBTQ+ access healthcare services. Preventive fear of discrimination and shame, together with the effects of cumulative stigma, are prominent elements often cited. However, the analysis also shows how feelings of pride and affirmation are crucial, for example in the choice of coming out to healthcare providers. The experiences collected thus indicate the possibility to integrate politics of emotion within the larger frame of socio-economic inequalities and debate the potential of such an approach.

REGISTRATION

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Previous seminars:

• View recording – 27th March 2025 – Dr Emily Cock (Cardiff University) – “very Vulgar and too Familier”: shame and healthcare in the early modern household
• View recording –  8th February 2024 – Dr Jennifer Evans (University of Hertfordshire) – ‘‘He was ashamed to let me know of it, and thought to have got cured otherwise without my knowledge’: Medical writer’s quibbles about genitourinary patients in early modern England.’
• View recording – 23 November 2023 – Professor Laura Kelly (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow) – ‘Shame in Narratives of Reproductive and Sexual Health in Twentieth-century Ireland’.
• View recording – 4th May 2023 – Dr Michael Brown (Lancaster University) – ‘Bodily Shame in Romantic Surgery’.
• View recording – 9th March 2023 – Dr Fred Cooper (University of Exeter) – ‘Loneliness and Shame: Towards a Historical Genealogy.’
• View recording – 5th May 2022 – Dr Anne Hanley (University of  Birmingham) – ‘I am polluted to the marrow, soaked in abomination!’ Shame and Sexual Health in Modern Britain.’

These seminars are approved by the Federation of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom for 2 category 1 (external) CPD credit(s) each.  A certificate of attendance will be issued.