Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities

Description

Charting shared advances across the emerging fields of medical humanities and health humanities, this book engages with the question of how biomedical knowledge is constructed, negotiated, and circulated as a cultural practice. The volume is composed of a series of pathbreaking inter-disciplinary essays that bring sociocultural habits of mind and modes of thought to the study of medicine, health and patients. These juxtapositions create new forms of knowledge, while emphasizing the vulnerability of human bodies, anti-essentialist approaches to biology, a sensitivity to language and rhetoric, and an attention to social justice. These essays dissect the ways that cultural practices define the limits of health and the body: from the body's place and trajectory in the world to how bodies relate to one another, from questions about ageing and sex to what counts as health and illness. Considering how these and other concepts are shaped by a negotiation between medico-scientific knowledge and ways of knowing derived from other domains, this book provides important new insights into how biomedical frameworks become settled forms for broader cultural understanding. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1 Identities/Institutions 1 Reproducing Horror: Nineteenth-Century Vampires and Twenty-First Century Megasellers (Livia Arndal Woods) 2 Postpartum Exhaustion in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (Alicia Andrzejewski) 3 Medical and Military Transitions in Anatomy of a Soldier (Kristina Fleuty) Part 2 Practices 4 On the Record: What Physician Texts Reveal about Physician Identities and the Electronic Health Record (Kamna S. Balhara 5 Mixed Feedback: The Promise of Structural Competency Education (Joshua Franklin) 6 The Perceived Freedom of the Visual Analogue Scale (Gabi Schaffzin) Part 3 Contingencies 7 Toward a Crip Medical Humanities (Travis Chi Wing Lau) 8 Tales of the City as Historical Document: HIV/AIDS, Serialization, Urban Landscapes, and Sexuality (John A. Carranza 9 The Suffering Caregiver: Toward an Embodied Experience of End-of-Life Pain through Literature (Benjamin Gagnon Chainey Part 4 Alternatives 10 Against “Endochronology”: Hormonal Rebellion and Generic Blending in Confessions of the Fox (Diana Rose Newby) 11 Whose Dystopia? (Anna Fenton-Hathaway) Coda (Roanne Kantor) References Contributors Index