During the Interdisciplinary Conference Historia zdrowia i ciała w perspektywie płci od średniowiecza do współczesności [History of Health and Body from a Gender Perspective from the Middle Ages to the Present Day], organised by the Institute of History of the University of Szczecin, the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Szczecin and the Komisja Historii Kobiet i Płci Kulturowej Komitetu Nauk Historycznych PAN [Committee on Women's History and Cultural Gender of the Committee on Historical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences], our team, almost in its entirety, presented a panel entitled: Żydowskie dyskursy o zdrowiu i ciele: Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia, XX wiek [Jewish Discourses on Health and the Body: Central and Eastern Europe, 20th Century.].

Link to the film from the opening of the conference from the University of Szczecin channel

Information and a detailed conference program are available on the University of Szczecin website.

As part of the panel, Prof. Joanna Degler presented a paper entitled Kwestie cielesności na łamach jidyszowych czasopism matrymonialnych [Issues of physicality in Yiddish marriage magazines], , in which she compared discourses on the body in two Yiddish marriage newspapers from Warsaw: Jugend Welt oder Der Hejrats Farmitler from 1908 and Hejrats Żurnal from 1930. Professor Degler was interested in the change that took place over the course of twenty years in the content of the advertisements in terms of how the male and female bodies were written about.

Justyna Lisak, in her paper entitled Wybrane aspekty zdrowia a wojna w pamiętnikach żydowskiego sanitariusza w armii Cesarstwa Niemieckiego (1915-1918) [Selected aspects of health in the face of war in the memoirs of a Jewish medic in the German Empire army (1915-1918)], focused on some of the most common ailments of soldiers fighting on the front line and how they were described by Hermann Abraham in his memoirs. Justyna Lisak showed how physical the experience of war is. The uniqueness of the source studied by our colleague lies in the fact that it describes the experience of illness from the perspective of both a military medical officer and a patient, in the person of Hermann Abraham, a Jewish pharmacist from Greater Poland Voivodeship.

Anna Kałużna (PhD) and Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała (PhD) in their paper entitled 'Es gejt mir op wi a conwejtik', or what Jewish doctors wrote about disease at the beginning of the 20th century, used the example of eye diseases and cholera to show how multi-layered the medical discourse of the time was and what social functions it fulfilled. Kałużna (PhD) and Kołodziejska-Smagała (PhD) also spoke about the mutual influence of Jewish and non-Jewish doctors and the flow of knowledge between the minority and majority groups.