ABSTRACT
The medical humanities have moved into an exciting era of interdisciplinary cross-currents, exchanges and debates that embrace the academic study of medical culture, competing notions of health and illness, public engagement with medicine, contemporary arts taking medical themes as a stimulus for provocative work, and new readings of the more traditional ‘primal scene’ of the doctor-patient relationship. This magisterial new Handbook offers a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the state of the medical humanities globally, showing how clinically-oriented medical humanities, the critical study of medicine as a global historical and cultural phenomenon, and medicine as a force for cultural change can intersect and inform each other.
Comprised of seven parts, this Handbook looks at the medical humanities as:
- a network and system
- therapeutic
- provocation
- forms of resistance
- a way of reconceptualising the medical curriculum
- concerned with performance and narrative
- mediated by artists as diagnosticians of culture and public engagement
Further developing our sense of what medical humanities can and does encompass, the Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities describes how the medical humanities can be put to work in and out of clinical settings, acting as a point of resistance, redistributing medicine’s capital amongst its stakeholders, embracing the complexity of medical instances, shaping medical education, promoting interdisciplinary understandings and recognising an identity for the medical humanities as a network effect. It pays attention to how the arts, humanities and liberal social sciences provide frames of reference that encourage imaginatively about typical clinical issues, such as diagnostic thinking and the consultation, and about wider issues such as the loose way in which descriptors such as ‘health’, ‘wellbeing’, ‘illness’, ‘pathology’ are used, carrying value judgements. At one and the same time, it explores how the clinical encounter, the education of doctors including identity constructions, and the study of medical cultures, could be interlinked for interdisciplinary inquiry.
This book is an essential read for all students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in the medical humanities.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|43 pages
Medical humanities as networks, systems and translations
part II|54 pages
Democratising medicine
part III|75 pages
Medicine’s metaphors and rhetoric
part IV|64 pages
Medicine as performance and public engagement
chapter 21|8 pages
Grasping emergency care through pop culture
part V|51 pages
Embodiment and disembodiment
chapter 28|8 pages
Relationships that matter
part VI|61 pages
The medical humanities in medical education
chapter 35|10 pages
‘Your effort was great/you carried me nine months’
chapter 36|16 pages
Medical humanities in Canadian medical schools
part VII|42 pages
The patient will see you now
chapter 40|9 pages
Doctors need safe confessional and cathartic spaces
chapter 41|4 pages
All thanks to the words of a stranger
part VIII|13 pages
Overview