Out of the Box Series: Medicine and the Normal Body

Out of the Box Series

PA Southside Clinical Unit

Medicine and Body Image: 

Medicine and the Normal Body

How did a once-obscure specialist medical term, “normal,” come to have such a defining influence on the way bodies are popularly thought about and treated in the present day? This talk will trace the curious history of the normal as it developed in nineteenth-century medicine, and reveal the surprising circumstances in which the word normal leap-frogged out of medical writing and entered everyday speech in the middle of the twentieth century. In so doing, the presentation will show how what was once a narrowly medical concept came to have such a strong and widespread cultural impact.

Presented by Associate Professor Elizabeth Stephens (IASH)

RSVP to med.pascu@uq.edu.au