Comment from the Field: Transforming Bodies: Ageing Seminar

Abstract

This event was the concluding seminar in the series Transforming Bodies: New Directions in Medical Humanities and Cultural funded by the Wellcome Trust, and followed previous seminars on Prosthesis and on Prenatal Genetic Screening and Neonatal Diagnosis held in Liverpool and Birmingham. Organized by Stuart Murray, Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film at the University of Leeds, it took place on 9 May 2011 in the newly opened Medical Humanities Centre in the School of English. Prof. Murray used Alice Neel's painting Last Sickness (1953) to introduce the day and raise issues he hoped would stimulate interdisciplinary discussions. He suggested that the painting, of an older woman, linked the process of ageing to the concepts of illness and disability in a way that has rarely been done. While the ageing process is considered normal, there is a reluctancy to associate it with disability, and there may be mileage not only in linking the two but in reconsidering ageing as a disabling process. To illustrate this, Prof. Murray drew on the examples of John Milton, James Joyce, and others, as writers who completed their greatest works while older and, crucially, disabled, the latter fact of which had not yet been used to inform these works. Questions of categorization and interaction, therefore, opened the themes of the day. Dr. Micheal Fitzpatrick, a General Practitioner from the Barton House Group Practice in London, opened the first panel with a talk entitled Looking After Adults with Autism in General Practice. He introduced his theme by outlining the controversies of the autism epidemic following the recent increase in diagnoses of children on the autistic spectrum, and of the hoard, an apparant lack of autistic adults in the face of so many autistic children. Dr. Fitzpatrick drew on three case studies from his own experience to demonstrate some of the issues of providing care for adults diagnosed as, or considered, autistic. His third example in particular raised the issue of the potential benefits of, and damages done by, an adult diagnosis of autism, both in critical discussion and for individual patients. He maintained that while the label of Asperger's had been helpful to his patient, there was, and continues to be, a lack of meaningful resources, particularly for medical and day care, to allow GPs to impliment current policy and make diagnosis truly useful in all cases. second speaker on the panel was Dr. Mary Godfrey from the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences. Her paper, Theorising Ageing Contained within or Constrained by Focus on Disability, sought to address the conceptual boundaries between ageing and disability by examining whether the social model of disability can be usefully mapped onto or help categorize the ageing process. After outlining the main principles of the social model she argued that the ageing process is framed as a one-way dependency relationship of the old upon the young in contemporary society, which does not take the changing courses of human lives over time into account. She maintained that the social model provided too narrow a scope to analyse ageing satisfactorily, and that other micro and macro factors should be taken into account, such as embodiment and lived experience, and the widening gap between a life expectancy and a health expectancy. afternoon began with Prof. Bridget Bennett, from the School of English at the University of Leeds, and her paper The Place of Death. A scholar of American literature, she argued that, despite the many forms of literature that specifically deal with it, death has become hidden in contemporary Western society. Even highly publicized accounts of the deaths of celebrities do not bring to light the minutiae of dying and its consequences. Prof. Bennet posed an intriguing question: when does dying, or the process of dying, actually begin? …