An inventive intervention, precarious and provocative, within the multilingual medical humanities, which makes a case for a way German research and medical humanities hold one another alive by performing it out.
Act II
Medical Humanities, German Research and Historical past of Artwork are setting the scene by way of Rembrandt’s portray The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaeus Tulp (1632). Rembrandt’s visible drama has at the least three lead figures: first, there may be the grasp surgeon, Dr Tulp, who enacts the anatomy by holding forceps in his proper hand and contracting the identical muscle groups along with his left hand that he’s pulling with the forceps on the physique being dissected. The second protagonist is the corpse of a younger prison, often called Aris Kindt, who was convicted of armed theft (for stealing a coat) and was sentenced to dying by hanging. The anatomical atlas, positioned on the backside finish of the slab, nearer to the image pane, is the third non-human lead agent. What are the ants doing?
Crimson wooden ants, Annja Neumann, Ina Linge.
Crimson wooden ants
(Begin to stack up a pile of pine needles, a number of try to raise a rusted monocle)
You speak so much about how the medical humanities want German research. However after all keystone mutualists want each other to take care of a thriving ecosystem the place we are able to survive. Annja, are you able to inform us about your analysis and the way the medical humanities are central to an expanded understanding of German research? What’s gained once we mix strategies on this means? Does cross-disciplinary analysis create extra materials for us ants?
Annja Neumann
Revolutionary strategies between German research and the medical humanities actually reduce each methods, and infrequently contain different analysis fields too (nods to Historical past of Artwork). The methodology that I developed additionally attracts on materials from artwork historical past (Historical past of Artwork performs three star jumps) and from medical anthropology and theatre and efficiency research. What I haven’t talked about but (Ina clears her throat and impatiently faucets on her watch) is that, in a minute, an unannounced actor will enter the stage (lightning flashes and the ants type the letter D, adopted by one other letter that may be construed as an H, on the open anatomical atlas to foreshadow future occasions). So, I don’t suppose I can contribute an origin fable for the expanded German research right here – a subject that advantages from two-way exchanges with different disciplines – or clearly outline who advantages essentially the most from cross-disciplinary analysis.
Crimson wooden ants
(They interrupt a dangerous manoeuvre with a plastic spoon)
This isn’t what we’re asking anyway (they proceed with their meticulous materials association of tiny objects).
Annja Neumann
Cross-disciplinary analysis tends to be collaborative work, so your colony of fellow ants (factors to the anthill that’s being constructed on the stage and that retains collapsing round its edges) is in place to realize essentially the most materials from this. Kind an orderly queue please. No pushing in!
(Brushes some hair out of her face and appears over to the anthill that’s swaying a bit, though hardly perceptible). My present guide mission on Re-staging public areas explores medical and public areas. I argue that medical and public areas are key websites during which it’s doable to deal with perceptions of social and digital developments and, by extension, generalise about our bodies and digital change in society at massive (Neumann 2024). My work partly focuses on German literature, visible tradition and efficiency, and partly on observe as analysis into medical areas and the medicalisation of the on a regular basis, undertaken throughout and after the COVID-19 pandemic within the UK and Germany.
Throughout archival work in Cambridge and Vienna, and by producing the hospital drama Professor Bernhardi (1912) by Austrian doctor-writer Arthur Schnitzler in numerous medical areas (your entire solid assembles round a desk centre stage, the place a spoon and a monocle are being inspected), I found – in collaboration with fellow researchers, artists and practitioners – that Schnitzler’s drama on docs re-performs Rembrandt’s canonical portray The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaeus Tulp (1632). Constructing on foundational work on Schnitzler and stereotype (Kolkenbrock 2019), I present how Schnitzler employs medical areas to dissect the antisemitism of Viennese society round 1900 (Neumann 2016).
To chop an extended story quick (seems at Ina’s watch), Schnitzler’s imaginary worlds – or his Story Spheres (Baker, Neumann and Webber 2020) – pointed me to a way and style that was standard in nineteenth-century Europe (factors to the desk): medical topography. Round 1900, medical topography was a large-scale medical survey of a spot or a area, of Vienna as an illustration, with regard to its geographical location, local weather, measurement of inhabitants, and an outline of the wellbeing of a inhabitants and customary ailments. It additionally offered descriptions of medical services, public well being companies, and the bodily and ethical training that was obtainable to residents. Schnitzler’s hospital play, Professor Bernhardi, employs medical and public areas to create a brand new medical dramaturgy to dissect and diagnose socio-political developments by way of literature. Moreover, it creates experiential studying for the viewers members, who regularly realise that they’re the patients-in-waiting (winks on the viewers) being addressed by the actors (Garrett et al. 2016; Neumann 2016).
This encounter with the historical past of drugs (places a sticker on Medical Humanities) not solely helped me to attract connections between the dramaturgy of Schnitzler’s play and the politics of well being on the time, however to see how the afterlives of Dr Tulp convey collectively German research and the utilized medical humanities. Schnitzler’s literary medical topography is radical, I feel, particularly once we place him subsequent to Sigmund Freud, who famously named him his Doppelgänger. It’s a daring transfer … however Schnitzler places teams of docs (invitations the solid to take a seat on the desk), organisations and socio-technical methods on the sofa. Extra essentially – and what distinguishes him from Freud – Schnitzler’s group evaluation is embodied. It’s mutually constituted by our bodies on and off the stage.
Ina Linge
Oh, I see! And that’s why you simply began working for an organisation that analyses unconscious processes and methods psychodynamics in teams, organisations, and communities through the use of strategies like group dynamics and social dreaming?
Annja Neumann
It’s a match! Due to Tulp and his anatomists (nods to Historical past of Artwork, who bursts right into a efficiency of three star jumps), and different keystone species (Ina stops additional star jumps to forestall chaos) who’ve been glorious guides, I’ve to say. My work on Rembrandt’s Tulp and his afterlives has launched me to rising fields and strategies. This contains (drumroll, adopted by Digital Humanities stumbling onto stage) the digital humanities, and has knowledgeable my work within the new and quickly increasing subject of the digital medical humanities (Bevan-Mogg, Westling and Neumann 2021).
Act III
The stage space is the display you’re looking at. Ants start to bounce.
Annja Neumann
(Observes the ants). Good strikes! (To Ina) How does your work transfer folks as we speak?
Ina Linge
I take pleasure in collaborating with various teams to know how historic constructions of gender and sexuality in Germany and consequent concepts about illness and well being are nonetheless related – nonetheless productive, nonetheless unsettling – as we speak. As a part of the Wellcome Belief-funded Transformations mission, I used to be a part of a staff of researchers that used queer historical past to have interaction younger, gender-diverse folks within the UK in discussions about diagnostic classes and medical authority. In our workshops, younger folks discovered the historic materials affirming and even life-changing, as a result of it supplied actually highly effective counter-narratives to a hostile public discourse that wishes to erase trans folks’s expertise and even existence. We even co-produced a podcast based mostly on our dialog! Participating with these populations who’ve most at stake in the best way scientific and medical histories of gender and sexuality are written is vital to researching this historical past (Barker et al. 2022). Culturally particular analysis can transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries (sits all the way down to look carefully at ants).
(To Annja) Can I return your query? How does your work transfer folks as we speak? And I imply this actually: how do our bodies and motion characteristic in your work as an artist-researcher?
Annja Neumann
Earlier I discussed digital medical storytelling. As a part of my observe as analysis, I take advantage of participatory digital theatre to know digital aesthetics and the underlying politics of embodiment in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr Tulp and his anatomist have been additionally tailored to digital areas, particularly in the course of the pandemic. For instance, I used a meme that tailored Rembrandt’s Tulp portray for a Zoom viewers as inspiration for a bit of interactive on-line theatre, Dr Tulp and the Theatre of Zoom (2021).
Theatre of Zoom was dwell streamed and occurred in actual time on the top of the primary lockdown within the UK. This meant that no person, neither actors nor members, shared a bodily area. Members have been requested to affix a Zoom name and transfer throughout totally different digital areas by way of level and click on actions (with their mouse). They took on the roles of the anatomists – relegated to a Zoom window within the gallery – and, extra essentially, solely regularly realised that they performed an element in a vaccine trial (Bevan-Mogg, Westling and Neumann 2020). It was compelling to expertise how Tulp’s anatomy lesson on Zoom not solely demanded fixed role-changes, as Rembrandt’s portray would, but additionally carried out our bodies in new methods; for instance, by way of the shared expertise of feeling caught or diminished to a rectangle on the display. The manufacturing confirmed that digital cultures are bodily cultures in spite of everything (Neumann 2020).
Apropos role-changes. What are you engaged on subsequent, Ina?
Ina Linge
I’m desirous about comedy as a efficiency and coping technique that permits us to debate matters that may be painful, from eco-anxiety to transphobia. One other mission I’m presently engaged on considers how German-language artists, scientists, and writers within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century created data about non-human animals and their pure atmosphere to form new concepts about gender and sexuality, and the place of LGBTQ+ folks in a good society. There’s one species I’m actually desirous about: Formica rufa, the purple wooden ant. Sexologists and writers have been obsessive about them. I feel I get it.
Ina Linge exits in pursuit of ants. Annja Neumann exits left. The Reader briefly takes within the display in entrance of them, then begins to reply by writing a reply under …
Concerning the authors
Dr Ina Linge is Senior Lecturer in German within the Division of Languages, Cultures and Visible Research on the College of Exeter, UK. Her analysis in queer German research, environmental humanities, and medical humanities investigates early twentieth-century sexual data manufacturing as a collaborative endeavour between the humanities and medical and pure sciences. Publications embrace the monograph Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing (Michigan College Press, 2023), which explores the significance of queer and trans life writing for sexual data manufacturing in early-twentieth-century Germany. Her latest work has explored the position of the non-human in sexual data manufacturing, see for instance an article on the position of butterfly experiments for German gay-rights activism and analysis within the Nineteen Twenties (winner of the 2020 Ladies in German article prize); and a co-edited particular difficulty on “Intercourse and Nature” for Environmental Humanities (2022).
Dr Annja Neumann is a Principal artist-researcher and innovator, a change marketing consultant, and an educator with 15+ years’ expertise on the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, the place she has simply joined the school for the Deepening Artistic Apply studying expertise for organisational management. She connects analysis as a cultural anthropologist and literary and efficiency scholar together with her embodied observe as theatre-maker, author and digital media artist. She additionally works as an Affiliated Lecturer in Digital Humanities on the College of Cambridge and as a Senior Analysis Fellow at Magdalene Faculty, Cambridge.
References
Baker, Frederick, Annja Neumann, and Andrew Webber. 2020. Schnitzler Story Spheres. Six interactive 360° digital panoramas and analysis instruments. http://schnitzler-spheres.lib.cam.ac.uk.
Barker, Jason, Kate Fisher, Jana Funke, Zed Gregory, Jen Grove, Rebecca Langlands, Ina Linge, Catherine McNamara, Ester McGeeney, Bon O’Hara, Jay Stewart, and Kazuki Yamada. 2022. “Adventures in Digital and Public Humanities: Co-Producing Trans Historical past Via Artistic Collaboration.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities, edited by Anne Schwan and Tara Thomson, 69–88. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bevan-Mogg, Wendy, Annja Neumann, and Carina Westling. 2020. Dr Tulp and the Theatre of Zoom. Video recording of on-line dwell efficiency. https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/3291878.
Garrett, Trine, and Camila França (creative administrators), and Annja Neumann (creative producer). 2016. Professor Bernhardi: A drama by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by Judith Beniston, and Nicole Robertson. A site-specific efficiency. Anatomy Lecture Theatre, Downing Website, Cambridge.
Kolkenbrock, Marie, 2019. Stereotype and Future within the Prose of Arthur Schnitzler. 5 Psycho-Sociological Readings. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Neumann, Annja. 2016. “Schnitzler’s Anatomy Lesson: Medical Topographies in Professor Bernhardi.” In Jahrbuch Literatur und Medizin 8, edited by Christa Jansohn and Florian Steger, 31–60. Heidelberg: Winter.
Neumann, Annja. 2020. “The Many Masks of Dr Tulp.” CRASSH Information, August 4, 2020. https://legacy.crassh.cam.ac.uk/weblog/publish/the-many-masks-of-dr-tulp.html.
Neumann, Annja, with Uta Baldauf. 2024. “Ready Room: Materials Moments of Drugs as Efficiency.” In The Routledge Companion to Efficiency and Drugs, edited by Gianna Bouchard and Alex Mermikides, 442–48. London and New York: Routledge.
