When the first waves of the Black Death struck Europe in the fourteenth century, the last thing likely to be on anyone’s mind was staying cheerful; yet overwhelmingly, this is the advice that contemporary physicians gave. Medieval plague treatises explained that dwelling excessively on the horrors of the plague and thoughts of death could actually…
Tag: health humanities
But who cares for the carer?
A few months ago, I offered a Graphic Medicine workshop at an event geared towards those who provide care to their loved ones impacted by cancer. The premise: for caregivers to use art, color, and words to reflect on their support systems and consider ways of broadening and deepening the connections which those systems comprise….
Contextualizing Twenty-First Century Schizophrenia Memoirs and Graphic Memoirs: Between Self-Help Culture and (De)Stigmatization
Schizophrenia is one of the most misused and contested psychological terms in medicine and culture (Carlson). Consequently, myths have proliferated since Eugen Bleuler built on Emil Kraepelin’s concept of “dementia praecox” to define schizophrenia as the disentanglement of psychic functions resulting in ambivalent feelings, autism, and abnormal affectivity (Frith and Johnstone 28–30). For example, schizophrenia…
The Geographic Self
The Communication of Pain In her book The Body in Pain, Scarry discusses the way that pain “shatters language” and threatens to be “unsharable” (4,5). She describes how pain belongs to an internal geography, when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to…
It Takes a Village to Heal the Doctor: How the Humanities Helped Me Reclaim Idealism in Practicing Medicine
On the phone with a close friend I vented about a homeless patient of mine who had a stigmatizing health history and whose documentation overflowed with pejorative language; scanning through the notes as I prepared for my palliative care consultation, I counted “noncompliant” six times in just one paragraph from one specialist. The term “noncompliant,”…
Considering the Objectivity of Medical Images
If all we need is to see the body to know it, what do we know? Throughout time, western medicine has sought to see deeper and deeper into the human body. Science has sought to develop technologies that help make the body visible, from X-rays to MRIs and CAT scans to microscopic imaging of bacteria…
Seinfeld, “The Junior Mint,” and How Medical Knowledge Lands in the Public Sphere
Despite its infamy as a “show about nothing,” Seinfeld’s “Junior Mint” (1993) episode is emphatically about medicine—medical knowledge, the medical world, medical “miracles”. More specifically, it centers on how the ‘general population’ receives medical knowledge. Interwoven subplots caricature the routes through which information about the body’s illnesses and healings pass into what we might call…
On Course Revision
Part of the privilege of junior leave is having a crucial opportunity for pause and reflection after the first few years of being on the tenure track. As I witness my fellow colleagues return to the classroom, many with new special topics courses, courses they’ve never taught before, or new versions of bread-and-butter courses they’ve…
On Reimagining Health Humanities and Disability Studies Courses
This fall, I will be on sabbatical for the first time in my career. In many ways, I am overwhelmed by the possibilities afforded to me by this privilege of time and space so unique to academia and one that few other professions have built into the process of promotion. Yet I remain deeply aware…
Reframing the Cultural Clash: A Literary, Disability Studies Reading of “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”
Anne Fadiman’s 1997 bestselling narrative nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, meticulously outlines the story of Lia Lee. Lia was a young Laotian refugee diagnosed with and unsuccessfully treated for severe epilepsy over the course of her childhood in California…