Events
The Movement for the Abolition of War welcomes you to all events.
War and Medicine exhibition
Dates: 15/12/08 to 15/2/09
Details: Aims to trace the history of both since the Crimean War. What is the politics of medicine when it is involved in keeping a war effort going? A big problem of warfare is that it keeps away from what it is to be humanising - how can medicine be part of that? A typically bravura show, put together with the Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden, it dares to tackle big ideas and to answer troubling, topical questions - through the analysis of medical interventions including the wartime dramas of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole, the birth of psychiatry as a response to shellshcok in WW1 and through David Cotterell's installation, recording how surgical teams operate behind the lines in Afghanistan. Especially striking about the relationship between war and medicine is that, as armies have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of harming their enemies, medicine has had to respond virtuosically to the changes in types of wounded casualties and increases in their number. Stuart Jeffries of the Guardian asks - 'what kind of sick society would organise itself that way?'
Location: The Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1