Council

The Association for Medical Humanities Council consists of up to 15 elected members, including four Officers, and student council members who represent the interests of the Association’s members in developing the medical humanities culture in the UK and internationally. Eligibility for election to and the functions of the Council are set out in the AMH Constitution. Currently the AMH Council meets four times a year including the Annual General Meeting, normally held at the Annual Conference. We encourage members to seek admission to Council as and when membership posts arise.

Current Officers and Council members, with major areas of responsibility as indicated, are:

Jennifer Patterson

President 2019 - present (Vice President (2016-19) and Membership Secretary (2013-2017) Conference Convenor, Greenwich 2016)

Jennifer Patterson is the current elected President of the Association for Medical Humanities.

I am an interdisciplinary feminist critical theorist with a doctoral research background in radical embodied readings of 20th Century French Surrealist literature and art history from UCL, London. Following time in business and journalism, I am now a part-time Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Health and Human Sciences at the University of Greenwich and a practicing Complementary Therapist of over 15 years. I currently teach professional health and education doctoral students. Since 2006, I have led a significant number of externally funded research and enterprise projects and published several peer reviewed journal articles and chapters in books. I see writing as activism, often based on experience, related to equity, rights and social justice, questioning cultural and ethical assumptions. I like to write about different things and use an interdisciplinary toolbox of applied feminist theory, applied sociology with creative use of linguistic visual and verbal methods such as discourse analysis and narrative analysis. My research and publishing uses theory to question and disrupt topics and normative assumptions in two key interdisciplinary areas: the Medical/Health Humanities and Sustainability Education. Latterly these combine in a focus on sustainable health with particular reference to women’s life-course events, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and menstrual hygiene practices, and thinking with and without a uterus. I am interested in the practical application of research projects I am involved in and have written on impact and been nominated for impact awards. For many years I was a visiting lecturer on the MA in Women’s Studies at Ruskin College, Oxford. I have also worked as an editor and translator outside of academia and have trained in Narrative medicine with Rita Charon in New York. I continue to work on the Listening to Patients’ Project and published the edited book Body Talk in Medical Humanities with Francia Kinchington in 2019.

Jo Winning

Vice President 2019 - present

Jo Winning is Reader in Modern Literature and Critical Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities and Programme Director of Birkbeck's MA Applied Medical Humanities and MPhil/PhD Medical Humanities programmes. Jo's teaching and research focus particularly on the interface between critical theory, clinical practice and patient experience, locating the ways that the epistemologies and methodologies of the humanities disciplines are intrinsic to the training and practice of medicine.

Linda Turner

Secretary 2019 - present (Conference Convenor, Southampton, 2014)

Linda is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton with a MA(Ed) in Literature and Language in Education. She introduced Medical Humanities into year 1 of the BM curriculum in 2008 as a mandatory module and leads an interdisciplinary staff group that teaches options in art, drama, music, creative writing, film and cultural studies to medical students. She has 25 years’ experience of innovative curriculum design and delivery in further and higher education and her own speciality is literature and narrative in medicine. She has presented papers nationally and internationally on curriculum delivery, teaching and learning and Medical Humanities and has supervised research projects in these areas.

Linda organised and hosted the AMH 2014 conference, ‘The Art of Compassion’, at Southampton and has co-curated two Medical Humanities exhibitions (2011 & 2014) at the Hartley Level 4 Gallery, Southampton, featuring work created by students and artists exploring experiences of health and illness.

Bridget MacDonald

Treasurer 2019 - present (Council Member (2017-2020))

Bridget MacDonald is a consultant neurologist working between Croydon University and St George's Hospitals in South West London. She has a rather eclectic interest in medical humanities in addition to postgraduate medical education. Her clinical interests are the practice of general neurology, epilepsy, learning disability and brain tumours.

Dr Michael Van Dessel

Membership Secretary 2020 - present

Dr Deborah Padfield

Council Member (2016 - Present)

Deborah is a visual artist specialising in lens based media and inter-disciplinary practice and research within Fine Art and Medicine. She is currently a Teaching Fellow and Honorary Research Associate at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (where she also received her PhD). She has collaborated extensively with clinicians and patients exploring the value of visual images to clinician-patient interactions and the communication of pain.

Her recent collaboration with Professor Joanna Zakrzewska and facial pain clinicians and patients from UCLH led to several exhibitions, symposia and the current UCL CHIRP funded project Pain: speaking the threshold. She lectures and exhibits nationally and internationally, most recently at the Houston Center for Photography and the 16th World Congress of Anaesthesiologists in Hong Kong. She co-organised the Encountering Pain Conference at University College London (UCL) in July 2016 www.ucl.ac.uk/encountering-pain and is the recipient of a number of awards including: Sciart Research Award and the UCL Provosts Award for Public Engagement 2012.
Photo © Liz Treacher
Her research focused on the benefits (and complications) of drawing within a multi-ethnic series of hospital communities in South East London, where she was a consultant microbiologist and college tutor for many years. Drawing was used to touch the craft skills of medicine, explore emotions and thoughts, referencing the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in the late 1960s and 70s. Special study modules in Medical Humanities, with final year medical students, fed into the research.

Prof Zoe Playdon

Council Member (2016 - Present)

Originally trained as an archaeologist and historian, I chose my third subject, English Literature, to start my career as a teacher in an inner-city comprehensive school. Somehow, I subsequently became a senior civil servant at the Department of Education and Science and then Head of Continuing Vocational Education at the University of Warwick, before becoming Professor of Postgraduate Medical Education at the University of London and Head of Education at NHS Kent, Surrey and Sussex Regional Postgraduate Medical Deanery in 1993. A former co-Chair of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Doctors and Dentists [GLADD], in 1994 I co-founded with Dr Lynne Jones MP the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity, which continues to meet. My interest is in the ways in which the complex, messy, everyday world of clinical practice can be illuminated by transdisciplinary working and the benefits for social justice which that can produce. I am now the Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London, and am currently completing my debut mass-market book, a trans social history entitled The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, for publication in 2020 by Bloomsbury (UK) and Scribner (US). If you would like to see examples of my work, it can be found at www.zoeplaydon.com

Dr Angela Hodgson-Teal

Council Member (2016 - Present)

Angela is an artist and researcher at the University of the Arts London, where she is in the final stages of a collaborative, socially engaged doctoral study Drawing on the Nature of Empathy.

Her research focused on the benefits (and complications) of drawing within a multi-ethnic series of hospital communities in South East London, where she was a consultant microbiologist and college tutor for many years. Drawing was used to touch the craft skills of medicine, explore emotions and thoughts, referencing the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in the late 1960s and 70s. Special study modules in Medical Humanities, with final year medical students, fed into the research.

Dr Joanne 'Bob' Whalley

Council Member (2017 - Present)

Dr Joanne 'Bob’ Whalley's artistic-research interests are embedded in performance, namely critical-spatial practices; dramaturgy; performance art and durational performance; spectatorship and practices of audiencing; performance and medicine; personal narrative and grief in performance. Throughout the course of her twenty-plus year academic career, She remains committed to inter-, cross-, trans-, and multi- disciplinary approaches, and has collaborated with choreographers, clinicians, musicians, photographers and architects. She is currently a Lecturer in Dance and Course Leader for MRes Choreography & Performance at University of Roehampton UK, and considers herself to be an artivist (artist + activist) teacher with a student-centred practice. Her first book 'Between Us: Audiences, Affect and the In-Between’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) celebrates spaces which cause an affecting, and bodies affected. She completed the first joint practice-as-research Ph.D. in 2004, and with her research partner creates performance, installations, performance text and objects for international audiences. Her Ph.D. students explore concepts of with-ness and witness in performance through auto/biography, grief narratives, ‘patienting’, empathy and affective exchange.
Bruce summers

Bruce Summers

Council Member (2018 - Present)

I am a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, still working full time for the NHS, and senior lecturer and lead tutor for medical humanities at the University of Keele medical school. I have an open university degree in the history of art and a masters degree in medical education, my dissertation being on medical humanities. I, and my unpaid team, organise and run courses in medical humanities for year 3 medical students undertaking humanities student selected components. We have attempted to broaden out contact with the humanities to all medical students and have created a literature and poetry website (keelebooksoflife.com), and we have also curated and published a poetry book specifically for year 1 students starting their medical education. There is much more we have done and we pushing forward with new ideas despite lack of funding

Ciara Breathnach

Council Member (2020 - present)

Dr Ciara Breathnach is Associate Professor in History at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and an Irish Research Council Laureate Awardee. Her current research project entitled Death and Burial Data, 1864-1922 (2018-2022), focuses on historical Big Data, cause of death and the social determinants of health. She has published widely on Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history, and her monograph Ordinary lives, death and social class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902 is under contract and forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Breathnach will host the AMH conference at the University of Limerick, 2021.

ORCID 0000-0002-4065-0660

Radha Bhat

Council Member (2016 - present)

Dr Radha Bhat is a Consultant Psychiatrist who specialises in Child and Adolescent mental health. She qualified as a member of the Institute of Group Analysis. And has an interest in medical education, she is involved in medical education at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School in her role as an Honorary Senior clinical lecturer and as a post graduate examiner at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Her interests in Medical Humanities developed from her clinical practice as a child and adolescent psychiatrist applying systemic and psychodynamic thinking in understanding the complexities of clinical problems. In collaboration with Consultant Paediatricians she setup interdisciplinary teaching for trainee doctors in Paediatrics and General Practice. It had become apparent that doctors need training in Medical Humanities in order to practice a bio psycho social approach. She completed a Masters degree in medical education on the subject of Interdisciplinary education on teaching psychosocial aspects of medical problems. She is currently an MPhil student at Birkbeck College, London and in the process of writing up her thesis on the subject of Medical apprenticeship.

Tríona Waters

Council Member (2020 - present)

Currently a Journal Launch Specialist at Frontiers Open Science Journal, my research centres on institutional and mental health care histories. I was elected onto the Association for Medical Humanities in early 2022. I completed my PhD in Psychiatric History at University of Limerick in 2020. I was then appointed Post-Doctoral Researcher at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, Child and Family Research Centre at National University of Ireland, Galway. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, I worked on a survivor-led project that examined language, terminology and representation of those directly affected by ‘Mother and Baby Homes’, ‘County Homes’, and related institutions.

I was awarded the Royal College of Physicians’ Ireland History of Medicine Research Award in 2018 for my work on the patients of St. Joseph’s Psychiatric Hospital. I am currently co-editing a collection titled ‘Institutions in Irish history: A methodological review’ (2023) and have numerous articles and book chapters published including the Journal for Irish Labour history Society and the Journal of the Society for the study of Nineteenth Century Ireland. I have organised and co-organised many national and international conferences including the ‘Prisons, Asylums and Workhouses: Institutions of Ireland’ (2019) and the ‘International Research Methods Summer School’ (2019 and 2022). In addition to being an elected member on the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences, I am on the senior advisory board for St. Brigid’s Psychiatric Hospital, Ballinasloe working together with local and national stakeholders in identifying future outcomes for the establishment.

Lorna Bo

Medical Student Representative (2021 - present)

I am a fourth-year medical student at the University of Cambridge, with a first-class BA in English. I have a keen interest in mental health and illness, with an eye to specialise in psychiatry in the distant future. My interest in the medical humanities lies primarily in literature, particularly narrative medicine, gender/queer studies and psychiatry/antipsychiatry. My BA dissertation was a Laingian study of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

Outside of my studies I enjoy reading, DJing, and playing classical piano.

I helped set up the student-led Cambridge University Medical Humanities Society and was its President from 2020-21. I am currently working on an arts-based qualitative research project on creative expressions of medical student experiences and am student representative in the AMH with Ananya. Together, we are leading student representation at the upcoming international AMH 2022 conference 'Fevers, Frets and Futures' convened with the IAS at UCL this September.

Ananya Sood

Medical Student Representative (2021 - present)

I am a final year medical student at St George’s University of London. Over the past year, I have undertaken an intercalated Bachelor of Science in Healthcare Management in Singapore. My primary interest lies in Women’s Health and Surgery, alongside a passion for Health Humanities, Medical Education, and Environmental Sustainability.

I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring the link between Humanities and Science during the module Finding a Leg to Stand On, an interdisciplinary course taught collaboratively by staff from St George’s Medical School and Birkbeck University of London. This gave me the opportunity to explore various conceptions of the human body in health and disease and an understanding of why we experience life a certain way.

Outside of my studies I am a professional Bhangra dancer and performer, and enjoy listening to music, making art, going to the gym, travelling and immersing myself in other cultures.

I believe that medicine and humanities are incomplete without one another, and I am grateful for the forthcoming opportunities I will have as my role as student representative in the AMH with Lorna. Together, we are leading student representation at the upcoming international AMH 2022 conference 'Fevers, Frets and Futures' convened with the IAS at UCL this September.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions, or would like to connect on all things, Medicine, Healthcare and Humanities! m1601652@sgul.ac.uk or soodananya98@gmail.com

Council Members

Jennifer Patterson (President 2019 – present)

Jo Winning (Vice President 2019 – present)

Linda Turner (Secretary 2019 – present)

Bridget MacDonald (Treasurer 2019 – present)

Michael Van Dessel (Membership Secretary 2020 – present)

Deborah Padfield (Council Member 2016 – present)

Zoe Playdon (Council Member 2016 – present)

Angela Hodgson-Teal (Council Member 2016 – present)

Dr Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley (Council Member 2017 – present)

Bruce Summers (Council Member 2018 – present)

Ciara Breathnach (Council Member 2020 – present)

Radha Bhat (Council Member 2016 – present)

Triona Waters (Conference Manager 2022)

Medical Student Representatives

Lorna Bo (Medical Student Representative 2021 – present)

Ananya Sood (Medical Student Representative 2021 – present)

 

Honorary Members/ Fellows

Alan Bleakley (Past President)

Joseph O’Dwyer (Past President))