Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities

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.

Rishi Goyal is Director of the Medicine, Literature and Society major in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, USA.

Arden Hegele is Lecturer in Discipline in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and the medical and health humanities. Her books are Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading (Oxford, 2022) and the anthology Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities (co-edited with Dr. Rishi Goyal) . Hegele’s research in Romanticism has been published in core journals, such as European Romantic Review, Romanticism, The Byron Journal, and Keats-Shelley Journal, and she has also published in Partial Answers, Gender and Education, and Persuasions. Her book reviews are featured in Public Books, Review 19, Studies in Romanticism, Victorian Network, Partial Answers and Avidly. She is a reviewer at British Medical Journal, Prose Studies, and elsewhere. At Columbia, Hegele has taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, in the Medical Humanities major, in the Core Curriculum, and in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia Medical Center. She is co-founding editor (with Dr. Rishi Goyal) of Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. She directs the Explorations in the Medical Humanities Series at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.