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L.C. Chan Memorial Lecture in Medical Humanities
The Value of Anecdotes in Contemporary Medical Practice
Date: 12 November 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 6:00 – 7:15 pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, Cheung Kung Hai Conference Centre, G/F, William Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Abstract:
Medicine is strewn with anecdotes, brief, pointed accounts of episodes drawn from scattered zones of healthcare experience. Frequently conveying lively observations, perceptions, feelings, reasonings, explanations and moral insights, anecdotes have long found their way into clinical notes, letters, and medical literature. Ranging from musings, micro-narratives, hypotheses and knowledge claims to snippets of dialogue and less organised utterances, these accounts have come to be disparaged as unreliable, biased, and often misleading. Articulated in unregulated, unauthorised, vernacular lingos which may not seek to isolate events and experiences from subjective thoughts and feelings about them, this talk treats anecdotes as an idiom of human formulation, expressive of attention and attempts at sense-making. As long as testimony remains central to clinical work, anecdotes will retain complex evidential warrants in medical practice.
Speaker:
Prof Brian Hurwitz
Emeritus Professor of Medicine and the Arts
Centre for the Humanities and Health
King’s College London
Biosketch:
Brian Hurwitz is Emeritus Professor of Medicine and the Arts at King’s College London where he directed the Centre for the Humanities and Health, a Wellcome funded research hub offering masters, PhD, and postdoctoral education for humanities and social science scholars, bio-scientists, and health professionals. Educated at Cambridge, where he first met LC Chan whom he later met up with many times in HK and London, Professor Hurwitz practised as an inner London general practitioner for 30 years.
He undertook RCTs in the primary care of Diabetes and Parkinson’s Disease and elucidated the contributions clinical case descriptions and medical anecdotes make to medical knowledge. He has researched the development of therapeutic pretences—sham treatments, placebos, medical misrepresentations and sleights of hand—from Graeco-Roman times to the modern period, and has published in medical, humanities, legal, medical ethical and philosophical fora.
He served on the first Advisory Board of HKU’s Centre for the Humanities and Medicine and has held honorary positions in a number of universities including HKU’s LKS Faculty of Medicine and School of Humanities, at the University of Sydney, and at the Institute of Neurology (Queen Square), London. Before he moved to King’s in 2002, he was Professor of Primary Care and General Practice at Imperial College London.
Registration (Click here)
LC Chan Memorial Lecture Rundown:
6:00 – 7:15 pm
Introduction by Prof Julie Chen (Director, Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit)
Lecture by Prof Brian Hurwitz on The Value of Anecdotes in Contemporary Medical Practice
Continuing Medical Education (CME) Accreditation: Under consideration
Tribute to Professor LC Chan
(Courtesy of Professor John Nicholls, extracted from Pathologue, the Newsletter of the Hong Kong College of Pathologists, Vol. 25, Issue 1, pp. 21-23. May 2016.)
The Eighth Inauguration of Endowed Professorships, 2014
M B Lee Professorship in the Humanities and Medicine 李文彬基金教授席 (人文醫學) – Professor Chan Li-Chong 陳立昌