Edited by Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods
Associate Editor Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton, Jennifer Richards
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.
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Key Features[An] epic, much-awaited collection of essays that brings together an impressive list of established and emerging scholars from around the world, and provides rich insights into the current shape of the medical humanities.
…a large and well-structured volume with a great deal of ambition.
The Medical Humanities have been at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary research in the late twentieth century. But where should it go now? This volume demonstrates why the future lies with developing an exhilarating, robust, and provocative critical medical humanities, and shows us how it can be done.