Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Health Humanities

Media Watch, 2021

As an emerging transdisciplinary field of inquiry, health humanities actualizes C.P. Snow’s vision, that is, to integrate “the two cultures” of sciences and humanities. Health humanities evolved from medical history/ethics and medical humanities via narrative medicine to form what is now called health humanities. Unlike scientific and medical approaches to disease, health humanities, while embracing the major stakeholders (patient/caregiver/doctors), offers insights into the experience of illness and how the individual constitutes the meaning of her health-related experiences. As health humanities demystify illness by talking of it, they also critique contemporary medical practices and its overdependence on technologies at the expense of human empathy. The concerns of health humanities are too broad and include the social determinants of illness, health justice, application of the creative arts, cultural contexts of medical care, global disparities, ethical challenges in medicine among others. In recent times, particularly with the onset of COVID-19 pandemics, there is a discursive move to integrate planetary health, environmental and health humanities to emphasize interspecies intermingling, entangled existence and embeddedness. Put differently, health humanities are many things at once because it works so well at different levels and, hence a significant cultural discourse in the post-millennial times. The aim of this collection is to think through the recent discursive, practical and narrative meanings of health humanities. Given the global traction and urgency of health humanities, this special issue published by Media Watch is one of its kind in India in that it seeks to curate the historical, cultural, psychological, literary and philosophical dimensions of health, illness, and well-being. This themed special issue of Media Watch titled “Health Humanities” is first of its scholarly intervention in an academic journal in India. The objective of this special issue is to expand the ongoing critical conversations on health humanities, to deepen the academic discourse surrounding the same, covering a wide range of issues/texts, and to understand our entangled existence with non-humans including plants, animals, microbes and to the planet itself. The essays curated in this special issue gesture toward the ideological, artistic, ethico-political complexities of health, illness and wellbeing and also showcase current, integrative humanities and arts approaches in medicine. In so doing, the special issue seeks to foster a cultured conversation between and among these issues.

I reflect on the integration of the humanities in health science and health professions education like nursing. The Humanities and Medicine Faculty Study Group hosted by the UConn Humanities Institute, some of whose members constitute today’s panel, has provided a sounding board and a catalyst for this reflection. Humanities disciplines and their discourses occupy discrete locations in the knowledge ecosystem, and, like any bodies in an ecosystem, the humanities adapt to other bodies of knowledge in the knowledge ecology. I want to suggest that three humanities methodologies and their discourses are vigorously symbiotic with the study of health, illness and health care. These three methodologies, often located in English, language or other humanities departments, are culture studies, semiotic theory, and technical communication.

As befits an emerging field of enquiry, there is on-going discussion about the scope, role and future of the medical humanities. One relatively recent contribution to this debate proposes a differentiation of the field into two distinct terrains, 'medical humanities' and 'health humanities,' and calls for a supersession of the former by the latter. In this paper, we revisit the conceptual underpinnings for a distinction between 'the medical' and 'health' by looking at the history of an analogous debate between 'medical geography' and 'the geographies of health' that has, over the last few years, witnessed a re-blurring of the distinction. Highlighting the value of this debate within the social sciences for the future development of the medical humanities, we call for scholars to take seriously the challenges of critical and cultural theory, community-based arts and health, and the counter-cultural creative practices and strategies of activist movements in order to meet the new research challenges and fulfill the radical potential of a critical medical humanities.

2024

2016

2010

Abstract: This discussion paper reviews and critiques literature related to the evolution of the medical humanities as an academic discipline and its contribution to healthcare provision. We argue that despite considerable advances in the field of medical humanities, needs have been identified for a more inclusive, outward-facing and applied discipline.

Focus on Health Professional Education A Multi-Professional Journal, 2023

Medical Humanities

Journal of Medical …, 2008

Journal of Medical Humanities, 2021