Moore, Lisa Jean. The Unknowable Body. Cambridge and Hoboken: Polity Press, 2026. 228pp. Hardback, ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-7074-4. In The Unknowable Body (Polity Press, 2026), Lisa Jean Moore asks about the painful, uncomfortable, and sometimes embarrassing tensions between being a critical scholar and navigating the real medical world with its many “overlapping dimensions of reality” (173). What…
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Grace Under Constraint: Unbound as Health Humanities
Photo: Karin, dancer in Unbound (2026). Courtesy of Unfixed Media / Sara Nesson, Director The constructive friction between biography and curiosity is often fertile ground for critical inquiry. Lately, I’ve been considering the implications of analyzing dance in a health humanities context. It makes sense—I first trained as a dancer, and as one of the…
The Architecture of Healing: From Maristans to Modern Hospitals
I hesitated as I followed my parents into the dimly lit hospital room. Beeping machines broke the uneasy silence, and the sharp scent of disinfectant filled the air. A family friend’s young daughter had been admitted for liver failure and was awaiting a transplant as her condition deteriorated. She was a couple of years younger…
Book Review: Everything Is Water by Chelsea Krieg
What does it mean to care for someone? This is a question we consider when looking at literature through the lens of health humanities and one of the questions implicit in the poetry collection, Everything Is Water by Chelsea Krieg. Throughout these poems, the idea of “care” appears in different contexts: care of the sick,…
Pinocchio and the Treatment-Resistant Patient
No sooner has Pinocchio learned to stand on newly-crafted legs, than he slips out the front door and runs away. He moves spontaneously, pre-reflectively. He stares, laughs and pokes his tongue out, he pulls hair, kicks, and runs away. He refuses to dwell in the master’s studio, preferring instead to wander in the university of…
Extraordinary Attorney Woo and the New Disability Media
The most prominent character trope concerning disability in the Korean mediascape (Appadurai, 2000, p. 27–47, 33) is autism with savant syndrome. Around 80 percent of the Korean media works that have characters with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) depict them as also having savant syndrome (Hwang, 2023). However, according to the SSM Health Trefferet Center, only…
Embracing Ava: On the Possibility of Disabled Cyborgs
Embracing Ava: On the Possibility of Disabled Cyborgs — In 2021, I ran a first-year composition course with the introduction of Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory [1] as the keystone text. For our unit on visual rhetoric, I assigned my class Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and challenged them to produce an analysis of the film that…
Poetics of Pollution: Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (2018)
Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic assures us that poetry might offer “resistance to the colossal science project that the industrialized world is currently performing on the bodies of its citizens without consent” (Dickinson, “Pataphysics” 14).
The Emotional Labour of Medical History
Recently, a professor questioned my use of the word “madness” when describing the mental states of patients in asylums in nineteenth-century Britain. The comment surprised me, as many renowned historians and recent publications use madness to describe mental health in nineteenth-century contexts.[1] Despite my confidence in my word choice, I panicked, worried that I had…