Travis Chi Wing Lau // During my final year of undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, I was studying at a café and had with me Seth Mnookin’s controversial new book, The Panic Virus.[1] While I was reading, I was approached by a woman who happened to be waiting for her order…
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The Criminal Mind: Discourses of Mental Health and Crime, Part 2.
Enlarged Photograph from “Brains of Feebleminded and Criminalist Persons,” a display at the 1921 Second International Congress of Eugenics. Part of Myrtelle M. Canavan Papers, 1898-1945, GA 10.20 “Myrtell Used with permission from the Harvard Medical Library. Abigail Jane Mack I began Part 1 of this series with the image I reproduce here. Item number 1552…
What Does Defamiliarization Make Happen?
Anna Fenton-Hathaway I learned the literary term “defamiliarization” years after it had upended a tiny part of my worldview. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), narrated by the horse of the title, was the vehicle for that early upending. One particularly heart-rending chapter meant that for years I could not look at a horse without being…
Back to Obstetrics: Beyond Normal and Problem Pregnancies
In the image that accompanies the title page of Aristotle’s Compleat and Experience’d Midwife (1700), the birthing chamber is depicted as a room full of lively, fleshed-out bodies, warm and inviting from the fireplace to the small animal sleeping in front of it. The baby is not pictured at all; the experienced midwives gather around…
The promise of teaching medical anthropology
Joshua Franklin In their classic essay about medical education, anthropologists Byron Good and Mary-Jo DelVeccio Good dispel the illusion of the medical humanities—anthropology in particular—as the savior of medicine. “Anthropology in medical schools,” they write, “thus occupies an ambiguous position; critic of the role of the natural sciences and the individualized and mechanistic forms of…
New Events: October 29-November 4
To post an event, write to aah2155[at]columbia.edu. Events this week Call for Papers: Midwest Victorian Studies Association, “Victorian Health and Wellness” (April 20-22, 2018) CFP for participation in seminars due October 31, 2017. See http://www.midwestvictorian.org/ for details. Humanities in Medicine Symposium: Rochester, MN October 27-29, 2017 The 4th Annual Mayo Clinic Humanities in Medicine Symposium…
Metaphors in Medicine
Charlene Kotei Communication is one of humanity’s oldest and most sophisticated technologies. Narrative is an integral part of the day-to-day transmission of ideas between people. In the medical world, technological and scientific advances have likewise made tremendous advances. And yet, the medical field still lacks the key to success: the effective interpretation of narrative. To…
23andMe as Modern Day Wunderkammer
Whether collected on journeys around the world, bartered for with tradesmen dealing in wonders, or obtained as a gift, the objects within Renaissance Wunderkammern spanned an extremely wide spectrum—from antique busts to horns that could cure any ailment. Paintings and illustrations of these rooms show off large spaces filled to crowdedness with a plethora…
Indigenous Poetics and Narrative Medicine
What exactly is narrative medicine, and how is it different from the work of humanities scholars who investigate medical topics? With this problem in mind, I set out to explore the roots of narrative medicine–not in academic medical schools, but in North American indigenous practices of healing through ritual storytelling. In our moment, narrative medicine…
Edward Said’s Migratory End-of-Life Aesthetics
Bassam Sidiki In his influential work The Wounded Storyteller (1995), sociologist Arthur W. Frank makes a move that has been largely undertheorized: the application of postcolonial theory to illness narratives. “Just as political and economic colonialism took over geographic areas,” he writes, “modernist medicine claimed the body of the patients as its territory, at least…