Care and Cure: Critical Approaches to Medical Humanities in the Modern World (PAMLA 2025 Special Session) (PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association) 2025)
San Francisco, California
Organization: PAMLA
Event: PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association) 2025
In all medical practices, two goals stand out: to cure and to care. In a vernacular context, care is discursive, relational, and mutual, while cure is linear, utilitarian, and quantifiable. In his book Care and Cure: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Medicine, Jacob Stegenga iterates on two sides of the care-cure conundrum: “[...] when an intervention mitigates harm then it provides some care, and when an intervention mitigates abnormal biological functioning
then it goes some way toward cure.”
This panel seeks to foster a discussion that crosses various disciplines on the subjective and untold experiences of the body, health(care), and illness. We hope to use “care and cure” to shed light on the dynamics between health and illnesses and address a series of questions in representations and narratives of illness, the effectiveness of care and therapies, as well as the connection and tension between care and cure as a scientific, ethical, and cultural problem.
This panel welcomes papers from literature, history, science, anthropology, religion, philosophy, film, art, music, and other related fields that engage with the theme from the 19th century across the world. We are especially interested in lesser-known materials and understudied communities. We welcome proposals both related to the conference theme, "Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion," and those not related.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Narrative medicine from all types of media
Bioethics
Biopolitics and governmentality
Mental health and literature, art and media studies
Limitations of medical or pharmaceutical knowledge
Medicalization of health/illness
History and cultures of medicine
Marginalized bodies in medicinal knowledge (queer, disabled, racialized, female)
Community/Immunity
Decoloniality in medical humanities
Pandemic and contagion
Aging studies and end-of-life care
Trauma and memory studies
How to Submit an Abstract?
To submit an abstract, please go to the PAMLA website: https://www.pamla.org/conference/2025-conference-theme/ and create an account. Then, please go to the call for papers list, search “Theory and Philosophy,” and then find the “Care and Cure” panel. Please then click the panel, and then you can find the “submit abstract” button in the upper right corner of the webpage.
Yuchen Yan
