Date: October 21, 2026 (Wednesday)
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Venue: Seminar Room, Room 7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU (MTR: Exit C1)
Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
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Title
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Abstract
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Prescriptions, Poetry, and Prose: Narration and Knowledge on Medical Topics in Literature |
What does literature know about medicine? Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded his students that the god of medicine is also the god of song. Indeed, verse long served physicians as mnemonic, and the case history is itself a kind of story. But what happens to that story when the doctor's note becomes a 'document'? What might Chekhov's doctor confined to his own Ward No. 6, Hemingway's convalescents in another country, Auden on the art of healing, or Johnson mourning Dr Levet tell us that the chart cannot? Is literature a form of clinical knowledge, or only its consolation? And who narrates – the doctor, the patient, or the institution between them? Perhaps we should consider instead the clinician as witness – if so, what kind of reading might witness require? This workshop takes up these questions through poems and short stories of doctoring and patienting, treating narration not as ornament to medicine but as a way of knowing. |
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Date: October 22, 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Venue: HKU Black Box, Room 54, LG/F, Centennial Campus, HKU (Location map) (MTR: Exit C1)
Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
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Title
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Abstract
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State of the Arts: A NeuroHumanities Perspective |
What can neurology tell us about art? Nobody doubts that the brain is at work when we paint, read, or listen. Indeed, neuroaesthetics has produced many scans of the Beautiful and many popular books, but little that the humanities would recognise as criticism. What, then, might the neurologist say to the humanist, and the humanist to the neurologist? What becomes of a work of art when disease alters how a person perceives, symbolises, or expresses? Can the clinic enrich our understanding of culture, or only reduce it? Perhaps what is needed is not a science of aesthetics but a criticism – one that reads the patient's diary alongside the EEG. This lecture proposes the NeuroHumanities as such a translational discipline, considering the brain as metaphor-maker and the artwork as a 'thought thing', in what is here termed the question of how brains who. |
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Michael Stanley is Division Director of Neurocognitive Disorders at Tufts Medical Center and an Associate Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. He is a graduate of Harvard College, Tufts University School of Medicine Maine Track Program, Mass General Brigham's neurology residency program, and Brigham & Women's Hospital's Behavioral Neurology/ Neuropsychiatry Fellowship. In addition to his administrative and clinical duties, he serves on a number of national boards and committees including the American Academy of Neurology's Brain Health Committee. He is a recognized fieldbuilder in the neurohumanities and in nearly every division of its manifold activities he has contributed lectures, workshops, essays, or support.
