Registration Link: For HKU members
MH Conversations and Connections Series – Lunchtime Seminar
Title: Contemporary Medicine as a Vocation
Date: 19 December, 2023 (Tuesday)
Time: 12:30 – 1:45 pm HKT
Venue: Rm 608, 6/F, William M W Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Mode: In-person
Registration Link: For HKU members
Abstract:
In recent decades, medical journals problematized physicians’ growing dissatisfaction due to limited work scope, increasing healthcare bureaucratization, unethical behaviors in the profession, inadequate pay, and “physician burnout.” This presentation explores this as a crisis in medicine as a vocation, comparing it with William Osler’s 1897 essay “Internal Medicine as a Vocation.” Osler, a key figure in modern medical education, articulated an ethos adopted by clinicians from the United States to Japan. The talk encourages discussion of medicine as a vocation, whether its crisis is an American phenomenon, and the relevance of classical texts like Osler’s in contemporary healthcare. It also addresses the significance of medical humanities in understanding these changes.
Speaker:
Professor Nicolas Langlitz
Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Psychedelic Humanities Lab at The New School for Social Research in New York
Professor Nicolas Langlitz, a medical doctor by training, is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine who uses ethnographic fieldwork to think through philosophical questions. He wrote three books: Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists (2020), Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (2012), and Die Zeit der Psychoanalyse: Lacan und das Problem der Sitzungsdauer (2005). He is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Psychedelic Humanities Lab at The New School for Social Research in New York.
Welcome to join us!
Enquiry: Please contact Mr Edison Cheng (mehu@hku.hk).
Photos for review
