Dealing With Surprising Facts: How The Humanities Can Help Devise The Logic Of Diagnosis In The Clinic, And How Medicine Can Discover Truth In Experience For The Humanities

Date: 22 October, Thursday | Time: 09:30 - 10:30 | Venue: Academia Auditorium

Speaker: Prof Ronald Schleifer, Prof Jerry B. Vannatta

Programme Description: 

This keynote lecture literally brings together two people who have devoted their professional lives to the comprehension of meaning in everyday human experiences and to the understanding and alleviation of pain and suffering in human life.  Pain and suffering – like happiness and joy – present themselves in our lives as surprising facts, anomalies in on-going life.  Part of the work of the Humanities is to comprehend such surprising facts as vitally significant, and much work in philosophy, literary aesthetics, and even history aims to capture a sense of value in what we experience.  Part of the work of Medicine is to understand the surprising facts of illness – its pain and suffering – as a matter-of-course in the framework of biomedical science.  This keynote presentation analyzes the ways that the Humanities and Medicine can work together in systematically dealing with surprising anomalies by focusing on the processes of understanding and comprehension in relation to a case of Thyrotoxic Hypokalemic Periodic Paralysis.