The Value of Anecdotes and Medically Anecdotal Information in Healthcare

Date: 17 October, Friday | Time: 09:30 - 10:30 | Venue: Academia Auditorium

Speaker: Prof Brian Hurwitz

Programme details: 
Medicine is strewn with anecdotes, brief, pointed accounts of human episodes, drawn from scattered zones of healthcare experience.  Traditionally viewed as short forms of discourse encompassing case reports, aphorisms, witticisms and hybridised versions of texts and utterances, some anecdotes are artfully fashioned micro-narratives making claims to knowledge, others are ‘twitchily alive’ observations and dialogues grounded in perceptions, thoughts and understanding. Frequently dismissed as medically and epistemologically doubtworthy if not misleading forms of frippery, this talk treats anecdotes and the anecdotal as vernacular practices of patients and practitioners which support descriptive and moral insights into medical situations and the social and power relations of healthcare. An ‘unauthorised’, unregulated idiom, which does not to seek to isolate events and experiences from subjective thoughts and feelings about them, anecdotes express a standpoint epistemology that presents healthcare circumstances in valuable new light.