Main description:

Charting shared advances across the emerging fields of medical humanities and health humanities, this book engages with the question of how biomedical knowledge is constructed, negotiated, and circulated as a cultural practice.
The volume is composed of a series of pathbreaking inter-disciplinary essays that bring sociocultural habits of mind and modes of thought to the study of medicine, health and patients. These juxtapositions create new forms of knowledge, while emphasizing the vulnerability of human bodies, anti-essentialist approaches to biology, a sensitivity to language and rhetoric, and an attention to social justice.
These essays dissect the ways that cultural practices 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, from questions about ageing and sex to what counts as health and illness.
Considering how these and other concepts are shaped by a negotiation between medico-scientific knowledge and ways of knowing derived from other domains, this book provides important new insights into how biomedical frameworks become settled forms for broader cultural understanding.

Contents:

Introduction - Rishi Goyal and Arden Hegele

I. Identities/Institutions

Chapter 1 - The Victorian Ethics of Reading Pregnancy in Contemporary Bestselling Fiction
Livia Arndal Woods

Chapter 2 - Postpartum Exhaustion in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale
Alicia Andrzejewski

Chapter 3 - Medical and Military Transition in Anatomy of a Soldier
Kristina Fleuty

II. Practices

Chapter 4 - On the Record: What Physician Texts Reveal about Physician Identities and the Electronic Health Record
Kamna S. Balhara

Chapter 5 - Mixed Feedback: The Promise of Structural Competence Education
Joshua Franklin
Chapter 6 - From Efficiency to Pain: A History of the Visual Analogue Scale
Gabi Schaffzin

III. Contingencies

Chapter 7 - Toward a Crip Medical Humanities
Travis Chi Wing Lau

Chapter 8 - Tales of the City as Historical Document: HIV/AIDS, Serialization, Urban Landscapes and Sexuality
John A. Carranza

Chapter 9 - The Suffering Caregiver: Pain at the End of Life
Benjamin Gagnon Chainey

IV. Alternatives

Chapter 10 - Against 'Endochronology': Hormonal Rebellion and Generic Blending in Confessions of the Fox
Diana Rose Newby

Chapter 11 - Whose Dystopia?
Anna Fenton-Hathaway

Coda
Roanne Kantor