From the past to the present: the medicine of the future in the mirror of time

The Wednesday Academy and the Siegen Forum kicked off the summer semester with a ceremonial opening under the general theme of "Medicine of the Future". The event made it clear that even though medicine has made enormous progress over the past decades and centuries, there are still links between the past, present and future.

In her welcoming address, Vice-Rector Dr. Barbara Müller-Naendrup emphasized the importance of such formats for social discourse. Topics such as the future of medicine and beyond require spaces for encounters and exchange in order to bring different perspectives into relation with each other and to enable well-founded considerations. The Wednesday Academy and the Siegen Forum in particular make an important contribution to this. At the same time, she referred to current developments at the university: with the emerging Campus Attractive Lifelong Learning (CaLL), central offers would be bundled and sustainably strengthened.

Prof. Dr. Stephan Habscheid then welcomed the audience and the speaker of the opening lecture, Prof. Dr. Noyan Dinçkal, Professor of European History of Knowledge and Communication at the University of Siegen, on behalf of the academic steering committee of the Wednesday Academy. He thus introduced the content of the event.

In his lecture, Prof. Dr. Dinçkal opened up a historical perspective on medical visions of the future. He made it clear that it was less important whether earlier predictions of the future had actually come true. Rather, a historically informed look at the visions of the future at the time opens up a perspective on which problems appeared to be solvable at the time and which hopes, promises and fears were associated with them. The future is not a fixed entity, but is always "itself situational" and changeable. Narratives of the future provide insights into the times in which they were formulated.

Using vivid examples - including from the early 20th century - Dinçkal took the audience on a journey through the recent history of medical visions. He showed what forms visions of the future can take and what they can relate to. He particularly emphasized the importance of visual representations: every image - for example in publications, in magazines or in the advertising material for this year's Year of Science, which is entitled "Medicine of the Future" - conveys a "visual argument". This emphasizes some aspects, while others - often socio-political implications - are pushed into the background. In current images of the future of medicine, for example, the central role of prostheses, which embody ideas of shaping and optimizing the human body, stands out. At the same time, however, problematizations of the healthcare system, for example, take a back seat to these images of designability.

Prof. Dr. Dinçkal thus built a bridge from historical visions of the future to the present of the Science Year 2026, concluding that looking to the past not only serves to understand earlier developments, but is ultimately a "form of self-enlightenment". It is important to make visible the assumptions and prerequisites under which medical forecasts and visions of the future are created. For just as history is not timeless, neither are the present and the future - which applies to medicine and beyond.