This event is now over. Thank you to all who attended!
Writing Illness: Women’s Experiences in the 19th-Century Sickroom
This workshop brings together historians of medicine and literary scholars to investigate how self-care and nursing of sick family and friends influenced Germany’s 19th-century women writers, in particular Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.
Topics addressed:
- Relation of soma and psyche
- Self-care, self-discipline, and self-estrangement
- Quotidian dimensions of myopia, fever, exhaustion, and headaches
- Dietetics
- Physical process of writing
- Atmospheric impacts on health
- Posture and Walking
- Homeopathy (since Droste-Hülshoff was an avid proponent)
- How medical texts generate and categorize knowledge and writing about the body
- Mutability and suffering in nature
- Poetics of Micro-perceptions
- Grief and Death
- Vaccine debates
Researchers:
Christiane Arndt (Queen's University), Marion Baschin (Bosch Institute for the History of Medicine), Martha Helfer (Rutgers University), Vanessa Höving (FernUniversität in Hagen), and Thomas Wortmann (Universität Mannheim).
The cross-disciplinary approach of this workshop highlights collaboration in the medical humanities, disability studies, feminist studies, life writing, and 19th-century cultural studies.
This workshop draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Event Details
This is a hybrid event and will be recorded.
Schedule: See the drop-down menus below to view the in-person and virtual schedule.
When: Wednesday, October 4, 2023
- 9:00am - 5:00pm
Where: Westmount Boardroom in Federation Hall at the University of Waterloo (200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario) and Zoom (live streaming).
Visitor Parking Available
In Lot M across the street from Federation Hall ($6 fee, payable by credit card). An interactive parking map can be found here. Once ticket has been purchased, please place on car dashboard.
Directions from Delta Hotel to Federation Hall
Organizer
Alice Kuzniar (akuzniar@uwaterloo.ca)