Fifty-five word stories: A unique form for reflection and creative expression in medical humanities

This book offers a critique of the dominant understanding and deployment of empathy in the mainstream medical humanities. Drawing on feminist theory, it positions empathy not as something that one has or lacks, and needs to accrue, but as something that one does and that is embedded within structural, institutional and cultural relations of power. It aims to provide a critically informed definition of empathy, drawing on phenomenology, in order to counter the vagueness of the term as it has often been used. It questions, too, the assumption that empathy is limited to the clinical relation, looking to a broader and more encompassing definition of the ‘medical’. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Pat Barker’s Life Class, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, this book contends that contemporary fiction is not a vehicle for accessing another’s illness experience, but itself engages critically with the question of empathy and its limits. The volume marks a key contribution to the rapidly evolving field of the critical medical humanities.

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Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0030 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Rosemary J. Jolly

Keyword(s):

Health Research ◽

Western Medicine ◽

Scientific Method ◽

Medical Humanities ◽

Right To Health ◽

The Body ◽

Health And Wellness ◽

Human Right ◽

Cultural Specificity ◽

The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

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Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0023 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Corinne Saunders

Keyword(s):

Medical Humanities ◽

Family Care ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Cultural Perspective ◽

Historical Sources ◽

Disease Treatment ◽

History Of Disease ◽

Health And Illness ◽

History Of ◽

Cultural Texts

A properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities. Such historical grounding requires taking a long cultural perspective, going beyond traditional medical history – typically the history of disease, treatment and practice – to trace the origins and development of the ideas that underpin medicine in its broadest sense – ideas concerning the most fundamental aspects of human existence: health and illness, body and mind, gender and family, care and community. Historical sources can only go so far in illuminating such topics; we must also look to other cultural texts, and in particular literary texts, which, through their imaginative worlds, provide crucial insights into cultural and intellectual attitudes, experience and creativity. Reading from a critical medical humanities perspective requires not only cultural archaeology across a range of discourses, but also putting past and present into conversation, to discover continuities and contrasts with later perspectives. Medical humanities research is illuminated by cultural and literary studies, and also brings to them new ways of seeing; the relation is dynamic. This chapter explores the ways mind, body and affect are constructed and intersect in medieval thought and literature, with a particular focus on how voice-hearing and visionary experience are portrayed and understood.

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Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Volker Scheid

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Chinese Medicine ◽

Medical Humanities ◽

Science And Technology Studies ◽

Human Beings ◽

The Past ◽

Starting Point ◽

The Us ◽

Shared Objective ◽

Definition Of

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.

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Drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness: Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depression

Communication & Medicine ◽

10.1558/cam.v11i1.18478 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 41-54 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Zsófia Demjén

Keyword(s):

Lived Experience ◽

Medical Humanities ◽

Sylvia Plath ◽

Individual Experience ◽

Qualitative And Quantitative ◽

The World ◽

The Individual ◽

Linguistic Methods ◽

Linguistic Approach

This paper demonstrates how a range of linguistic methods can be harnessed in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the ‘lived experience’ of psychological disorders. It argues that such methods should be applied more in medical contexts, especially in medical humanities. Key extracts from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath are examined, as a case study of the experience of depression. Combinations of qualitative and quantitative linguistic methods, and inter- and intra-textual comparisons are used to consider distinctive patterns in the use of metaphor, personal pronouns and (the semantics of) verbs, as well as other relevant aspects of language. Qualitative techniques provide in-depth insights, while quantitative corpus methods make the analyses more robust and ensure the breadth necessary to gain insights into the individual experience. Depression emerges as a highly complex and sometimes potentially contradictory experience for Plath, involving both a sense of apathy and inner turmoil. It involves a sense of a split self, trapped in a state that one cannot overcome, and intense self-focus, a turning in on oneself and a view of the world that is both more negative and more polarized than the norm. It is argued that a linguistic approach is useful beyond this specific case.

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