At the Fondation des États-Unis, we invite you to think about medicine, the body and health in a creative, collective and interdisciplinary way. We receive health researchers, artists, social scientists, journalists and patients to address issues that affect everyone’s experience (being sick, understanding how the body works, thinking about political and institutional choices related to medicine). These questions often remain addressed in the compartmentalization of scientific, medical, psychological, political, economic disciplines… The conferences proposed within the framework of Medical Cultures thus cross medicine and arts in the hope of reaching an audience of patients and carers.
Why this theme at the Fondation des États-Unis?
In writing her bequest in 1928 for the creation of scholarships to the Fondation des États Unis, Harriet Hale Woolley wished to give one of the scholarships to a young psychiatry intern, expressing her admiration for the recent transformations in medicine. It was therefore appropriate to integrate the historical interests of the Medical Foundation into our cultural program. The United States was a pioneer in Medical Humanities, seeking to develop, within the medical curriculum, teaching in philosophy, history, cinema or literature. At the same time, interdisciplinary studies of health issues were addressed by American researchers, who read and discussed the analytical stories of French medicine (Foucault, especially but more broadly what they call the French Theory) for application in their own fields. Susan Sontag’s book Illness as a Metaphor, published in 1978, bears witness to this. At the same time, books on the popularization and reappropriation of medical issues such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as patient associations such as ACT UP, have spread the idea that health and medicine should be considered in an interactive dialogue between patients, health actors and political institutions.
Season 2023-2024
September 12, 2023 : Conférence des internes boursières en psychiatrie – Nausicaa Christodoulou, Laura Guatteri, Harriet Hale Woolley alumni
Season 2020-2021
5 January 2021 : Perinatal Care in Prisons – Caroline Tourant, researcher at ISP Cachan
Season 2019-2020
19 November 2019: Art& Psychiatry – Doctor Marine Raimbaud, psychitry, Saint-Anne Hospital, Paris
Season 2018-2019
16 April 2019: La schizophrénie au cinéma : fiction et réalité – Doctor Marine Raimbaud, psychitry, Saint-Anne Hospital, Paris
15 November 2018: Pop Culture & Psychiatry #3 : Rehab – Doctor Jean-Victor Blanc, psychiatrist, Saint-Antoine Hospital, Paris
Season 2017-2018
26 June 2018: Pop Culture & Psychiatry #2 – Docteur Jean-Victor Blanc, psychiatrist at Saint-Antoine Hospital, Paris
8 February 2018: Pop Culture & Psychiatry #1 – Docteur Jean-Victor Blanc, psychiatrist at Saint-Antoine Hospital, Paris
Season 2016-2017
17 November 2016: Art in addictions – Jean-Pol Tassin, emeritus Head of Research, l’INSERM & Antoine Perpère, artist and exhibition commissioner
Season 2015-2016
About the brain: neuroscience, reveries, psychiatry…
18 February 2016: New Parentalities Professor Ouriel Rosenblum, Paris Pitié Salpêtrière, psychoanalyst & Anne Crémieux, Associate Professor, Paris-Ouest Nanterre University
5 November 2015: The Art of Dreaming and Making Dreams in a Hospital Department Professor David Cohen, Head of child psychiatry Department Paris Pitié Salpêtrière & Pauline Aubry, author of comic books
7 October 2015: Music in Neuroscience Reading Organized by Benoit Theuil, Harriet Hale Woolley scholar, psychiatry intern