Between 2015 and 2023, the Fondation des États-Unis held an annual cycle called Medical Cultures. Conferences and related events served as an invitation to reflect on medicine, the body, and health in a creative, collective, and interdisciplinary way.
The FEU welcomed researchers from the fields of health, art, and the humanities to address questions that touch on universal experiences: being ill, how the body works, and the political and institutional choices linked to medicine. These questions, which are traditionally only addressed within the confines of the scientific, medical, psychological, and economic disciplines, were instead tackled by combining the field of medicine with the arts and humanities in the hope of reaching and affecting an audience of both patients and caregivers.
To augment the annual conference, the FEU partnered with Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Institut Brune, and Médiathèques de l’AP-HP to offer art, theater, and dance workshops—a collaboration between the FEU’s own artists-in-residence and specialized nurses. As part of a broader medical context, FEU musicians-in-residence played concerts in hospitals or at patients’ bedsides. These experiences have had an equal impact on the artists-in-residence, the patients, and the teams.
Medical Cultures was organized in collaboration with the Harriet Hale Woolley Fellows in Psychiatry, who coordinated or gave lectures on their research topics and helped develop the off-site projects. During the Covid period, their contribution was digital, with the creation of prevention videos and online conferences.
Why this theme at the Fondation des États-Unis?
In writing her bequest in 1928 for the creation of scholarships to the Fondation des États Unis, Harriet Hale Woolley wished to give one of the scholarships to a young psychiatry intern, expressing her admiration for the recent transformations in medicine. It was therefore appropriate to integrate the historical interests of the Medical Foundation into our cultural program. The United States was a pioneer in Medical Humanities, seeking to develop, within the medical curriculum, teaching in philosophy, history, cinema or literature. At the same time, interdisciplinary studies of health issues were addressed by American researchers, who read and discussed the analytical stories of French medicine (Foucault, especially but more broadly what they call the French Theory) for application in their own fields. Susan Sontag’s book Illness as a Metaphor, published in 1978, bears witness to this. At the same time, books on the popularization and reappropriation of medical issues such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as patient associations such as ACT UP, have spread the idea that health and medicine should be considered in an interactive dialogue between patients, health actors and political institutions.
Season 2023-2024
September 12, 2023: Psychiatry Scholars’ Conference – Nausicaa Christodoulou & Laura Guatteri, Harriet Hale Woolley alumni
Season 2020-2021
5 January 2021: Perinatal Care in Prisons – Anais Ogrizek, Harriet Hale Woolley Scholar and Caroline Tourant, researcher at ISP Cachan
Season 2019-2020
19 November 2019: Art& Psychiatry – Doctor Marine Raimbaud, psychitry, Saint-Anne Hospital, Paris
Season 2018-2019
16 April 2019: La schizophrénie au cinéma : fiction et réalité – Doctor Marine Raimbaud, psychitry, Saint-Anne Hospital, Paris
15 November 2018: Pop Culture & Psychiatry #3 : Rehab – Doctor Jean-Victor Blanc, psychiatrist, Saint-Antoine Hospital, Paris
Season 2017-2018
26 June 2018: Pop Culture & Psychiatry #2 – Docteur Jean-Victor Blanc, psychiatrist at Saint-Antoine Hospital, Paris
8 February 2018: Pop Culture & Psychiatry #1 – Docteur Jean-Victor Blanc, psychiatrist at Saint-Antoine Hospital, Paris
Season 2016-2017
17 November 2016: Art in addictions – Jean-Pol Tassin, emeritus Head of Research, l’INSERM & Antoine Perpère, artist and exhibition commissioner
Season 2015-2016
About the brain: neuroscience, reveries, psychiatry…
18 February 2016: New Parentalities Professor Ouriel Rosenblum, Paris Pitié Salpêtrière, psychoanalyst & Anne Crémieux, Associate Professor, Paris-Ouest Nanterre University
5 November 2015: The Art of Dreaming and Making Dreams in a Hospital Department Professor David Cohen, Head of child psychiatry Department Paris Pitié Salpêtrière & Pauline Aubry, author of comic books
7 October 2015: Music in Neuroscience Reading Organized by Benoit Theuil, Harriet Hale Woolley scholar, psychiatry intern