Medical Humanities
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 August, 2022
Deadline for submission of full articles: 31 October, 2022
Concept Note:
Looking at the varied possible intersections between medical sciences and literature, this journal issue invites proposals on the theme of medical humanities. It is a fertile ground where the modern studia humanitatis meets the medieval medicus which in medieval Latin meant both “healing” and “magic” at the same time. Over the past few years, medical humanities has not only emerged as a genre but also a method in itself: a method of doing literature and a method of doing medicine, in a theory-praxis double bind. Since the publication of Susan Sontag’s seminal text Illness as Metaphor (1978), the field is growing in myriad ways to reclaim the (post)human side of medicine and also understand the gradual medicalization of literary studies.
The post-Covid world has suddenly encountered a rampant medicalization of society, politics, culture, history and economics. From an already medicalized present, we are now moving towards a more medicalized future. The world is now floating in the stream of pathological signifiers. This sudden global and yet quotidian collapse of the boundaries between logical and pathological seems to mark the spirit-of-the-age.
Among other things, medical humanities as a practice tries to find the marginalized voices, through illness narratives and care narratives, in the metanarrative of techno-capitalism of modern medicine. It seeks to find and foreground the voice of the sufferer and the voice of the immediate caregiver amidst quite dehumanizing jargon of medical bulletin. It seeks to decipher the subdued metalanguage of illness in the modernity of health. The lived-experiences are given as much importance as existing episteme. The economy of health runs on ability, productivity, quantity, speed, flow, spatial and temporal management, visibility and reproduction. Illness by being outside of it, resists and subverts the hegemony of health. Illness is the other side of modernity.
Medical humanities is in continuous dialogue with modernity and the modern. It also generates a dialogue between literary studies and medicine and while doing so, it is not only transforming the two disciplines but also itself. It is now that non-essential third term: a “medicalhumanities” which has moved beyond word spacing (medical humanities), a conjunction (medical and humanities), and a hyphen (medical-humanities).
Sub-themes:
- illness narratives, care narratives, narrative medicine
- pathology, pathogenesis, pathography
- medical humanities, transhumanism, posthumanism
- medical posthumanities
- medical humanities and anthropocene
- medical humanities, art, literature, cinema, TV series
- re-reading canons through medical humanities
- medical humanities and pedagogy
- medical humanities and continental philosophy
- medical humanities, race, class, caste, gender, sexuality
- medical humanities, empire, postcolonialism
- transforming STEM through medical humanities
- transforming (post)literary studies through medical humanities
- medical humanities, phenomenology, epistemology