The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities

Description

In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area. Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performance, the postcolonial, public health, touch, twins, voice and wonder. Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge and make a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience. List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Part I Evidence and Experiment 1 Entangling the Medical Humanities 2 Modelling Systems Biomedicine: Intertwinement and the ‘Real’ 3 Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future 4 The Lived Genome 5 Getting the Measure of Twins 6 Paper Technologies, Digital Technologies: Working with Early Modern Medical Records 7 How Are/Our Work: ‘What, if Anything, is the Use of Any of This?’ 8 Afterword: Evidence and Experiment Part II The Body and The Senses 9 Picturing Pain 10 The Body Beyond the Anatomy Lab: (Re)addressing Arts Methodologies for the Critical Medical Humanities 11 Touch, Trust and Compliance in Early Modern Medical Practice 12 Reframing Fatness: Critiquing ‘Obesity’ 13 Reading the Image of Race: Neurocriminology, Medical Imaging Technologies and Literary Intervention 14 Touching Blind Bodies: A Critical Inquiry into Pedagogical and Cultural Constructions of Visual Disability in the Nineteenth Century 15 The Anatomy of the Renaissance Voice 16 Breathing and Breathlessness in Clinic and Culture: Using Critical Medical Humanities to Bridge an Epistemic Gap 17 Morphological Freedom and Medicine: Constructing the Posthuman Body 18 Afterword: The Body and the Senses Part III Mind, Imagination, Affect 19 Medical Humanities and the Place of Wonder 20 Man’s Dark Interior: Surrealism, Viscera and the Anatomical Imaginary 21 Narrative and Clinical Neuroscience: Can Phenomenologically Informed Approaches and Empirical Work Cross-fertilise? 22 On Pain of Death: The ‘Grotesque Sovereignty’ of the US Death Penalty 23 Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing 24 Victorian Literary Aesthetics and Mental Pathology 25 Aphasic Modernism: Languages for Illness from a Confusion of Tongues 26 Trans-species Entanglements: Animal Assistants in Narratives about Autism 27 Afterword: Mind, Imagination, Affect Part IV Health, Care, Citizens 28 Medical Migration and the Global Politics of Equality 29 Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine 30 Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine 31 Culture in Medicine: An Argument against Competence 32 The Roots and Ramifi cations of Narrative in Modern Medicine 33 Broadmoor Performed: A Theatrical Hospital 34 On (Not) Caring: Tracing the Meanings of Care in the Imaginative Literature of the ‘Alzheimer’s Epidemic’ 35 Care, Kidneys and Clones: The Distance of Space, Time and Imagination 36 Afterword: Health, Care, Citizens Notes on Contributors Index