My article on “Health, Medicine, and Literature in the American Context” has posted on the online Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Check it out here: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1358

Summary

Writers have long explored illness and care as key themes in a wide range of work across a variety of literary genres. In the second half of the 20th century, literature and medicine emerged as a subfield of literary study as well as a component of medical education. In the American context, since the 1970s, research and teaching methods associated with the subfield of literature and medicine have become increasingly institutionalized in universities and medical schools. As with many emergent fields, there has been much debate around the name of the field and its primary objects of study and methods of analysis. Interdisciplinary scholars have expanded the field from a narrow focus on literature to a broader interest in the multiplicity of discourses, texts, genres, and forms—including verbal, visual, digital, and multimodal forms of creative expression and pedagogy. As a response to this expansion beyond literature, several alternatives to “literature and medicine” have been proposed and institutionalized as part of the process of field formation. Around 2000, “narrative medicine” emerged as a clinical practice that emphasizes the role of stories in medical encounters and seeks to teach health practitioners narrative competence as a form of care. Other scholars have debated whether “medical humanities” or “health humanities” best captures the parameters and investments of the field, with health humanities offered as a more inclusive name indicating the importance of spaces, practices, and practitioners beyond the institution of medicine. Some scholars have proposed “health studies” or “critical health studies” as encouraging the cross-fertilization of theories and methods from the humanities and social sciences (including medical sociology, history of medicine, philosophy, and literary studies), as well as from the interdisciplinary fields of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, science studies, critical race studies, and disability studies, into medical and health thought and practice. Scholars calling for a more critical medical humanities or health studies argue for the importance of structural analysis and an examination of how power operates in medicine and health care. Many notable developments—including the turns to narrative, to comics, and to structural analysis—have had global impacts, especially in light of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The experience of illness and its diagnosis and treatment connects the local and phenomenological—the embodied individual in the world and in relation to others (loved ones, caretakers, health practitioners, health advocates, and activists)—with national and transnational systems and structures, including health care policies and delivery services, basic and applied medical research and development, and poverty, racism, war, climate change, and other environmental factors contributing to the increasing precarity of vulnerable people and health disparities between populations.