Dr Huw Morgan MBChB  FRCGP  Cert Med Ed  FHEA 

 

Huw is a retired GP (Family Physician) and medical educator. He spent over twenty years in a busy inner-city General Practice in Bristol, UK, when he was also a director of GP training and undergraduate teacher in the local University medical school.  He then spent several years working in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe helping develop medical education and Family Medicine training with development agencies and a charity (with which he is still involved). He returned to GP education and undergraduate teaching for the last few years of his career, and remains involved in training doctors how to teach. He is a highly experienced and entertaining lecturer and presenter. He has developed an interest in the history of medicine, and has a number of talks under the heading, ‘Wisdom, quackery and science – an amusing and informative look at medicine through the ages’. The first of these, ‘Ancient wisdom and practice’, looks at medicine from earliest times to the Middle Ages. The second, ‘Compassion and Education’, explores medicine from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and the final one, ‘The rise and fall of Modern Science’, considers the benefits and problems that have arisen from the Enlightenment to the present day, in the era of modern medical science. His thesis is that there has been wisdom, quackery and science in all eras, and that the modern era of medical science has lost some of the wisdom that characterised earlier times. He also has two other talks called, ‘Mad, bad or sad?’, about the development of and problems around modern Psychiatry.

 

TOPICS:

 

• Ancient Wisdom and Practice

This covers medical beliefs and practice from the earliest times to the Middle Ages, tracing the influence Shamans and the early Egyptians, Chinese and Indians, up to the time of Hippocrates and Galen, two of the key ‘fathers of modern medicine’.

 

• Compassion and Education

Here we review the influence of the then ascendant Islamic world on medical practice in the early middle ages, the founding of the first medical schools, and the fusion of contemporary medical knowledge with compassionate care in the Christian and Islamic traditions that greatly benefited sick and suffering people at the time.

 

• The Rise and Fall of Modern Science

This outlines the rapid expansion of knowledge and understanding of disease and the human body that occurred from the 19th century onwards, and the rise of modern highly developed technological medicine. We also consider the emergence of complementary and alternative medicine and the problems posed by an exclusively scientific approach to sickness.

 

 

There are further lectures under the heading, Mad, Bad or Sad? – the development of modern Psychiatry.

 

• From Demon Possession to Deinstitutionalisation

This talk traces the origins of understanding of mental illness from earliest times, to the building of institutions specifically to care for the ‘insane’ and their demise in the wake of modern drugs to control mental illness, and the challenges of community care.