CALL FOR PAPERS
‘Humanism and Medicine in the Early Modern Era’, 22-23 September 2006
ARC NEER and Cassamarca Foundation-funded symposium to be held at UWA.

The symposium will explore the complex, and sometimes troubled, relationship between humanism and medicine from the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries. The father of humanism, Francesco Petrarca, famously attacked the medical profession in Against the Doctors (1352). Humanism spoke a new language – theoretically a natural, classical Latin, as opposed to the ‘barbaric’ scholastic idiom of the philosophers and the Galenist gobbledygook of the doctors. But the cultures of humanism and medicine inevitably enriched one another: doctors and humanists shared a professional interest in the ancient texts (from Dioscorides to Lucretius), and a vested interest in preserving Latin as a professional argot. Humanism had its own healing pretensions through poetry and moral philosophy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, doctor and humanist sometimes co-existed in the same person such as Girolamo Fracastoro, Girolamo Cardano, Julius Caesar Scaliger, François Rabelais, and Pierre Petit. 
The symposium’s keynote speakers include Professor Ian Maclean (All Souls College, Oxford) and Professor Vivian Nutton (Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College, London).
Papers (20 minutes) should consider various aspects of this broad theme, including but not limited to the interface between learned and non-learned medicine, vernacular humanism and medicine, the evolution of the identity of the humanist physician over the early modern era, and the extent to which a consciousness of ‘two cultures’ prevailed in different local and institutional contexts.
Please send a 300-word abstract before 31 October 2005 to the conference organisers A/Professor Yasmin Haskell and Dr Susan Broomhall at broomhal@cyllene.uwa.edu.au

Notice for Postgraduates and Early-Career Researchers - Financial Assistance
Postgraduates and ECRs may apply to NEER for financial assistance towards the cost of essential travel and accommodation. Applications should include details of the degree in which you are enrolled (PGs) or your current research project (ECRs), an estimate/quote of anticipated expenses, and notice of any financial support that may be provided by your home institution (or other source). 
NEER’s policy is to award financial assistance on the basis of:
a. The demonstrated necessity of the funding.
b. The applicant's distance from the proposed activity.
Preference will be given to applicants who have not yet received funding from NEER. Applications for funding will close on 25th August 2006. For further information please contact:

Dr Claire McIlroy
Coordinator
ARC Network for Early European Research M208
University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Hwy
CRAWLEY  WA  6009
cmcilroy@cyllene.uwa.edu.au