The Shame and Medicine Project presents the Shame and Medicine in Literature Seminar Series, hosted by the Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health.
Shame, Elspeth Probyn tells us, ‘is a painful thing to write about’ (‘Writing Shame’, 2010). This Seminar Series interrogates the connections between the experience of shame and its literary representation, extending discussions initiated by the ‘Shame and Medicine’ thematic issue of Literature and Medicine, edited by Dr Arthur Rose and Professor Luna Dolezal.
Scheduled seminars:
TITLE: Training through Shame: Affect and Temporality in Medical Education
ABSTRACT: Shame and time intertwine and shape the conditions of medical training. Shame is a temporally sensitive emotion highly relevant to the healthcare context and culturally inscribed within medical education in the United States and United Kingdom. Drawing from feminist, phenomenological, and queer of color conceptions of time and shame, this paper uses narratology to analyze popular medical memoirs of medical training. I propose two primary modes of time within medical training, a linear time, and a future-oriented time (Minkowski) and map them onto chronic and acute shame experiences as represented in medical memoirs. Shame-in-time influences the material conditions impacting medical learners and clarifies the mechanisms of broader shame culture in medicine. Anecdotes from memoirs suggest both the challenges of medical training and potential ethical opportunities for reshaping the training narrative to better support diverse student experiences and turn the system towards shame-sensitive, humanistic patient care.
BIO: Penelope Lusk (she/her) is a PhD candidate (ABD) at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2024-2025 Queen Elizabeth Scholar at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. Recent work on shame and medicine is forthcoming in Hypatia and Literature and Medicine, and published in Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice and Communication and Medicine https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.1558/cam.21481.
Registration and more details will follow soon.
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