Notes from the President

This year at Kalamazoo . . .

Dear Members and Friends,

I’m happy to report another successful conference as Medica continues its tradition of sponsoring sessions at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies, held at Western Michigan University at Kalamazoo. Our session “Medicine as Metaphor” was well attended, and both speakers' presentations were enthusiastically received and prompted lively responses from the audience.

Of special note, this year we officially initiated our first annual Medica Graduate Student Award which includes a stipend of $250. I was delighted to begin our session by introducing Virginia Langum, who received the 2009 award for her paper The Surgeon as Confessor and Priest. Virginia is in the final year of a Ph.D. in English at Magdalene College, Cambridge University. Her research examines intersections between medicine, religion and literature.

The abstract for Virginia’s winning paper as well as for the session’s other fine paper, Julia Schlozman’s Christ among the Surgeons: Piety and Surgical Practice in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript, are recorded below. See the Medica website for more information about the award.

As usual, we also held our society’s annual business meeting at the congress. The meeting was well attended, and in addition to finalizing proposals for Medica sessions at next year’s 45th congress, we also discussed plans to co-sponosor with AVISTA (The Association Villard de Honnecourt for Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science and Art) a day of sessions on Secular and Sacred Sites of Healing at the 46^th International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in 2011. More news to come.

Announcements and Updates:

• Gentle reminder to all members -- if you haven’t done so already, it’s time to pay your 2009 membership dues. Annual dues for Medica is $20 for full-time professionals and $10 for retired faculty, part-time faculty, and students. Make out checks to Medica and mail to our Treasurer and Secretary, Gerard NeCastro, Department of English, 9 O’Brien Avenue, University of Maine at Machias, Machias, ME 04654. For more information contact Gerard at necastro@maine.edu.

• Announcement of our accepted sessions at the 45^th International Medieval Congress in 2010 will be made in July 2009.

• Please check out the Medica website for more information on the 2010 Graduate Student Award and be sure to encourage talented graduate students pursuing research on medieval medicine to apply.

Lastly, let me welcome all Medica members and friends to our society’s newly initiated Medica blog. Though still in its nascent form, I hope that as Medica grows and develops, it will provide a useful venue of communication for our members and friends.

Cheers,

Linda Migl Keyser