Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities

"Charting shared advances across the medical humanities and health humanities through a transdisciplinary prism, this book connects the approaches of the biological sciences with the critical study of the arts. Through a series of essays in diverse fields--from literary studies and medical anthropology to neurology and emergency medicine--the collection illustrates how the divergent methods and orientations of medical humanities and health humanities might be constructively juxtaposed and potentially bridged. This collection explores a shared problem in medical humanities and health humanities: how are medico-scientific ideas about the body constituted, circulated, and settled? While biomedicine often aspires to be a positivist science, it is--explicitly and implicitly--in constant negotiation with other domains of culture. Medico-scientific knowledge shapes a set of normative cultural practices that 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, to what counts as health and illness. Aging is both a medical reality and a social act; sex is a biological condition inseparably tied to cultural ideas of affect, desire, and beauty. This volume examines how these and other concepts are shaped by a negotiation between medico-scientific knowledge and ways of knowing derived from other domains, and it interrogates how biomedical frameworks become settled forms for broader cultural understanding."--