Medical/Health Humanities Research Guide

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice. In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field--and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection's contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences.  With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, Health Humanities Reader truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness.

This is the first manifesto for Health Humanities worldwide. It sets out the context for this emergent and innovative field which extends beyond Medical Humanities to advance the inclusion and impact of the arts and humanities in healthcare, health and well-being.

This book illuminates and challenges professional healthcare relationships. The authors examine the nature, context and purpose of healthcare relationships, explore models through which these relationships are enacted, developed and critiqued, and provide narratives of health practice relationships in action.

Narrative medicine has emerged in response to a commodified health care system that places corporate and bureaucratic concerns over the needs of the patient. Generated from a confluence of sources including humanities and medicine, primary care medicine, narratology, and the study of doctor-patient relationships, narrative medicine is medicine practiced with the competence to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness. By placing events in temporal order, with beginnings, middles, and ends, and by establishing connections among things using metaphor and figural language, narrative medicine helps doctors to recognize patients and diseases, convey knowledge, accompany patients through the ordeals of illness--and according to Rita Charon, can ultimately lead to more humane, ethical, and effective health care.Trained in medicine and in literary studies, Rita Charon is a pioneer of and authority on the emerging field of narrative medicine. In this important and long-awaited book she provides a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the conceptual principles underlying narrative medicine, as well as a practical guide for implementing narrative methods in health care. A true milestone in the field, it will interest general readers, and experts in medicine and humanities, and literary theory.

"Combining scholarly essays with visual narratives and a conclusion in comics form, establishes graphic medicine as a new area of scholarship. Demonstrates that graphic medicine narratives offer patients, family members, and medical caregivers new ways to negotiate the challenges of the medical experience. Discusses comics as visual rhetoric"--Provided by publisher.

For most of literary history, personal confessions about illness were considered too intimate to share publicly. By the mid-twentieth century, however, a series of events set the stage for the emergence of the illness narrative. The increase of chronic disease, the transformation of medicine into big business, the women's health movement, the AIDS/HIV pandemic, the advent of inexpensive paperbacks, and the rise of self-publishing all contributed to the proliferation of narratives about encounters with medicine and mortality.       While the illness narrative is now a staple of the publishing industry, the genre itself has posed a problem for literary studies. What is the role of criticism in relation to personal accounts of suffering? Can these narratives be judged on aesthetic grounds? Are they a collective expression of the lost intimacy of the patient-doctor relationship? Is their function thus instrumental--to elicit the reader's empathy?       To answer these questions, Ann Jurecic turns to major works on pain and suffering by Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Eve Sedgwick and reads these alongside illness narratives by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Reynolds Price, and Anne Fadiman, among others. In the process, she defines the subgenres of risk and pain narratives and explores a range of critical responses guided, alternately, by narrative empathy, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the practice of reparative reading.        Illness as Narrative seeks to draw wider attention to this form of life writing and to argue for new approaches to both literary criticism and teaching narrative. Jurecic calls for a practice that's both compassionate and critical. She asks that we consider why writers compose stories of illness, how readers receive them, and how both use these narratives to make meaning of human fragility and mortality.