What a great start to our interdisciplinary project “The ’Hospital Discharge Letter’ through the lens of Cultural Studies: on the Narrativity, History and Ethics of an unknown Genre of Medical Communication”, funded by Schweizerischer Nationalfonds SNF.
On the 16.December, the whole team gathered at Université de Fribourg/Universität Freiburg for our kickoff meeting. For the next four years, we are going to examine the hospital discharge report from a variety of disciplinary lenses and with a multitude of methods.
Countless hospital discharge letters are written everyday in clinics worldwide. But what do we really know about this subject matter, which we almost take for granted as a routine part of medical care systems?
We are going to investigate the stories told by physicians everyday through this special medium of medical documentation.
How has this process developed historically from the beginning of the 20th century to today? How have hospital discharge documents been crafted, disseminated, and treated? What are the specificities of this genre, and how can we make sense of the sociocultural significance of this special storytelling? What normative components are reflected in the practice and medium of hospital discharge letters?
These and many more questions we will investigate in our multidisciplinary team of cultural scientists, literary scholars, historians, and medical ethicists.
From right to left:
Ralf J. Jox (PI Ethics), Martina King (PI Cultural History and Literary Studies), Jasmine Lovey (Postdoc History), Sophie Püchel (Doctoral Researcher Ethics), Tom Behrendt (Doctoral Researcher Cultural History and Literary Studies), Frédéric Mader (Research Assistant and future Doctoral Researcher History), Angela Gencarelli (Senior Researcher Cultural History and Literary Studies), Felix Rietmann (PI History), and Agnes Kandlbinder (Postdoc Ethics).