Over forty years ago, the history of medicine shifted its priority and focus from the medical profession and institutions to the patient’s voice (see: Porter, 1985). Scholarship from a range of fields in the subsequent decades – including the history of medicine, medical humanities, and the history of technology – has treated ‘patients’ as much more than simply the recipients of medical intervention or passive bodies at the blunt end of the medicalising process. Conversely, there is widespread acceptance that it is equally reductive to see the ‘patient’ as a subaltern agent heroically resisting a medical power imposed from above. The 'patient' in late modernity is always multiple: operating in a diverse array of spaces and conceptualised by a varied range of actors.

Cultivating patients brings together historical and wider humanities approaches to being and acting as a late modern ‘patient.' It draws on material, institutional, biosocial, and philosophical perspectives and is organised through ongoing work at Uppsala University’s Centre for Medical Humanities on patienthood across historical contexts and academic disciplines. This interdisciplinary research asks how ‘being’ a patient changed since the nineteenth century and how these changes are connected to new technologies, institutions, social relationships, and forms of political consciousness. Building on this research, the workshop explores the reciprocal, divergent, and sometimes contradictory identities of being and acting as a patient in late modernity.

Our concrete aim is to develop the idea of the ‘patient’ as a ‘trading zone’ (Galison, 1997).  In employing Galison’s term, the workshop interrogates its applicability to patient research in two ways. First, we approach ‘trading zones’ as an analytic category of patient identity – how have patients mobilised their own bodies and knowledges in specific times and places? How have patients been integrated into professional and technological processes? Second, we see the ‘trading zone’ as a way of drawing together a wide range of scholarship on medicine and health – how are our own theoretical and disciplinary perspectives unified and extended by treating ‘the patient’ as a common interdisciplinary object of analysis?

For any queries, contact Andrew Burchell.

Cultivating Patients is a network organised as part of the ActDisease project at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala university.