Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities

Rishi Goyal, Arden Hegele

"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...