Medical Humanities Program to Sponsor and Host Conference on “Chronicity and Crisis”

The Montclair State University Medical Humanities Program and the Waiting Times Research Group are pleased to sponsor “Chronicity and Crisis: Time in the Medical Humanities” Conference to be held at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, October 25–26, 2019.

The conference will bring together scholars from the humanities and social sciences as well as the psychosocial disciplines, health studies, and biomedicine to examine how the concepts of chronicity and crisis inform historical and contemporary understandings of health, illness and well-being. “Chronicity and Crisis” aims to open up the relationship between the long term and the urgent in order to address a range of questions in individual, social and global health.

The temporal aligning of care and illness — the potentially long time-frames of care as juxtaposed to the urgency of acute interventions — factors into the success of diverse medical treatments. From the prioritization of wait times in emergency centers to approvals by insurance companies and the monitoring of chronic physical and mental illnesses, care is determined by more than the treatment at hand. Likewise, adverse public health outcomes arise from social inequities and inequalities of long historical duration, including the chronic legacies of colonial violence, the inaccessibility of public spaces for the less abled, the health risks of environmental neglect, or gender imbalances in the subjects of medical research. The narrative markers of onset, frequency, and remission inform how the experiences of sudden and chronic illnesses are communicated, from self-reporting and clinical records to medical fiction, biography, and memoir.

The conference is accessible and open to the public.