Medicine, Health and Being Human begins a conversation to explore how the medical has defined us: that is, the ways in which perspectives of medicine and health have affected cultural understandings of what it means to be human.
With chapters that span from the early modern period through to the contemporary world, and are drawn from a range of disciplines, this volume holds that incremental historical and cultural influences have brought about an understanding of humanity in which the medical is ingrained, consciously or unconsciously, usually as a mode of legitimisation. Divided into three parts, the book follows a narrative path from the integrity of the human soul, through to the integrity of the material human body, then finally brought together through engaging with end-of-life responses. Part 1 examines the move from spirituality to psychiatry in terms of the way medical science has influenced cultural understandings of the mind. Part 2 interrogates the role that medicine has played in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in constructing and deconstructing the self and other, including the fusion of visual objectivity and the scientific gaze in constructing perceptions of humanity. Part 3 looks at the limits of medicine when the integrity of one body breaks down. It contends with the ultimate question of the extent to which humanity is confined within the integrity of the human body, and how medicine and the humanities work together toward responding to the finality of death.
This is a valuable contribution for all those interested in the medical humanities, history of medicine, history of ideas and the social approaches to health and illness.
Introduction Part 1: Situating the soul, self, and mind 1. Physicians and the soul: Medicine and spirituality in seventeenth-century England Michelle Pfeffer 2. Hearing differently: Medical, modern and medieval approaches to sound Bonnie Millar 3. Sensing the self in the wandering mind Hazel Morrison 4. Soul searching: Psychiatry’s influence on selfhood Patrick Seniuk Part 2: Ethnographic constructions of self and society through medicine 5. Evidence-based medicine, the placebo effect, and performativity in healing Hannah Lesshafft 6. Voices in medicine: Bad news, good news Jennifer Greenwood 7. From Blumenbach to population genetics: A genealogy of the five races in the life sciences Jordan Liz Part 3: Realism and images in medical science 8. Defining the human with photographic precision: Medical objectivity and artistic realism Corinna Wagner 9. Scientific humanism in missionary photography Prue Ahrens 10. Medical imaging’s intrusive gaze Catherine Jenkins Part 4: Monsters, markets, and chimeras 11. Wonders and monsters: Negotiating medical-triggered redefinitions of humanity through popular fiction in the nineteenth century and today Anna Gasperini 12. Law, medicine, and monsters in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien Kathryn Bird 13. Imagining a kidney market: Transplantation, Prometheus and the monster’s bride Stephen M Young 14. The narratives of plastic surgery reality shows in South Korea: The patient’s success story, the surgeon as creator, and the permeability of expert knowledge Carmen Voinea Part 5: Medicine and humanity toward the end 15. My lawful wife and mistress Uzo Dibia 16. In Lady Delacour’s shadow: Women patients and breast cancer in short fiction April Patrick 17. The death of sympathy in Great War literature M. Renee Benham 18. A humanistic perspective on the curative power of language at the end of life: Restoration of the self through words and silence Andrea Rodrígez-Prat and Xavier Escribano
Lesa Scholl teaches in the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland, Australia.
