Beyond Clinical Metrics: Ethnography, History, And The Lived Experience Of Medicine

Date: 23 October, Friday | Time: 14:00 - 15:30 | Venue: Academia Room, L1-S1

Speakers: Prof Harry Wu, Assoc Prof Chen-I Kuan

Programme Synopsis: 

This interdisciplinary session brings together Harry Yi-Jui Wu and Chen-I Kuan to explore how historical and ethnographic approaches can deepen medical education and public health practice. While conventional medical training often prioritizes biomedical evidence, epidemiological data, and standardized clinical reasoning, this session highlights the importance of understanding suffering, illness, and care through lived experiences and social contexts.

In “Seeking the Suffering Experiences Forgotten by Medicine in the Field,” Wu examines how historical fieldwork, oral histories, and attention to marginalized voices reveal dimensions of illness and healing that are frequently absent from institutional medicine. Drawing from the history of medicine and medical humanities, the lecture demonstrates how patients, families, and communities experience medicine in ways that cannot always be captured through quantitative measures alone.

In “Responding to Public Health Challenges with Ethnography,” Kuan discusses how medical anthropology and ethnographic methods can help clinicians and public health practitioners better understand community behavior, cultural meanings, trust, and everyday practices during health crises. The presentation emphasizes how ethnography contributes to perspective-taking, empathy, and more socially responsive healthcare interventions.

Together, the session argues that historical and ethnographic methods are not peripheral to healthcare education, but essential tools for cultivating reflective practitioners capable of engaging with the complexity of human suffering, social inequality, and community-based care.

Programme Details:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

1. Explain how historical and ethnographic methods contribute to understanding illness experiences that are often overlooked in conventional biomedical education.
2. Analyze how lived experiences, cultural contexts, and social relationships shape responses to healthcare and public health interventions.
3. Reflect on how perspective-taking and qualitative inquiry can strengthen empathy, communication, and socially responsive medical practice.