This is a repost of our 'About' page when the site was first published.
'Medicine 360 asks what medicine and the arts can give one another in the pursuit of a good life.
Medicine 360 developed out of a ten-year collaboration between the staff, students, and graduates of the University of Bristol's intercalated BA in Medical Humanities, and with the recent support of the Centre for Health, Humanities and the Sciences.
In 2020, Medicine 360 was to hold its first festival -- a week-long series of events, panels, drop-in sessions, and talks, running June 8th to 13th.
These mixed well-known speakers with academic researchers and expert practitioners, and put aside plenty of time for Q&A sessions. The aim was to bring about conversations around a particular topic or experience from a variety of perspectives; so where there was, say, a doctor, there would also be a patient, and a carer.
Like many aspects of our lives at the moment, these events have been put on hold, awaiting their restart -- whether later in this year, or the next.
The topics of those planned conversations, however, are as -- or more -- important now, than they were before.
Many of our panelists, and some committee members, are caught up directly with the current events, and can no longer participate. We remain deeply grateful for their past support, and, in quite different ways, for their present efforts. We very much hope they will be able to join us when the festival proper takes place.
Meanwhile, in these in between times, this site will, with the help of other of the panelists and partner organizations, explore the original seminar topics in a variety of on-line ways, using the website more as a platform.
For that reason, and as a promise of the programme we hope to deliver later, we have left the original 'Schedule' pages largely unchanged.
Over the coming weeks and months, we hope the website will develop into a useful online resource around our planned topics, and so will offer an interesting context for them when we can, once again, assemble. As additions to the site are made, these will be Tweeted out from @UoBrisIBAMH. If you are not on Twitter and would like to be kept informed, please use the form on the Contact page (see menu bar).
The pre-pandemic version of this page ended by saying: 'If Medicine 360 is about any one thing, it is about showing that there are varieties of normal and many kinds of standard.' That seems equally true now, if in unintended ways.
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