In medicine, translation is a daily practice. Complaints, pain, and suffering have to be expressed in clear messages to the physicians, who draw their diagnosis and subsequent treatment from signs and symptoms. In addition, translation has become the buzzword for introducing latest and sometimes rather difficult results of biomedical research into patient care.

Translation in medicine covers a much broader terrain than currently debated in “Translational Medicine.” There is simply no safe and obvious “bridge” from bench to bedside and from bedside to the realities of life, since different data, discourses, and meanings do not always match easily, and when making clinical decisions the complexities of everyday life need to be considered. Today, translation occurs in medicine between languages as different as genomics, epigenetics and health tracking, and in contexts as complex as existential situations that arise from severe illnesses. Patients’ lifeworlds clash with clinical reasoning and with different practices of conceptualizing and categorizing in the life sciences.

This international conference explores the challenges of translation in medicine. It approaches the problematic of translation from medicine and science studies, philosophy and anthropology.

CONCEPTION: Cornelius Borck (Lübeck), Christoph Rehmann-Sutter (Lübeck), Christina Schües (Lübeck)

PARTICIPANTS: Hauke Busch (University of Lübeck), Shai Brill (Tel Aviv University), Carlo Caduff (King's College London), Alberto Cambrosio (McGill University, Montreal), Havi Carel (University of Bristol), Jiska Cohen-Mansfield (Tel Aviv University), Erika Dyck (University of Saskatchewan), Monica Greco (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Teodora Manea Hauskeller (University of Exeter), Haim Hazan (Tel Aviv University), Lisa Käll (Stockholm University), Ulrike Kluge (Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin), Shai Lavi (Tel Aviv University), Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter), Barbara Prainsack (Universität Wien), Christian Schubert (Universitätsklinik für Medizinische Psychologie Innsbruck), Katrin Solhdju (Université de Mons), Henrik Vogt (NTNU Trondheim), Gail Weiss (The George Washington University, Washington D.C.), Bernhard Wieser (IFZ Graz), Stefan Willer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) 

The conference is jointly organized by the IFK in cooperation with the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies, Universität zu Lübeck, Germany.

Kindly supported by the City of Vienna.