Medical Humanities may be broadly conceptualized as a discipline wherein medicine and its specialties intersect with those of the humanities and social sciences. As such it is a hybrid area of study where the impact of disease and healing science on culture is assessed and expressed in the particular language of the disciplines concerned with the human experience. However, as much as at first sight this definition appears to be clear, it does not reflect how the interaction of medicine with the humanities has evolved to become a separate field of study. In this publication we have explored, through the analysis of a group of selected multidisciplinary essays, the dynamics of this process. The essays predominantly address the interaction of literature, philosophy, art, art history, ethics, and education with medicine and its specialties from the classical period to the present. Particular attention has been given to the Medieval, Early Modern, and Enlightenment periods. To avoid a rigid compartmentalization of the book based on individual fields of study we opted for a fluid division into multidisciplinary sections, reflective of the complex interactions of the included works with medicine.
Author(s): Rinaldo F. Canalis, Massimo Ciavolella, Valeria Finucci
Series: Medical Traditions, 7
Publisher: De Gruyter
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 436
City: Berlin
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction: Setting up the Terms
Rethinking Medical Humanities
Philosophy and Ethical Queries
Pondering the Perimeters: Towards a Definition of Medical Humanism
Avoidable Mistakes – Premodern Medical Fallibility as an Ethical Problem with Epistemological Implications
When the Fetus Becomes a Child: Some Reflections from the Long Eighteenth Century
Ethical Responsibilities in the Curing/Caring Relationship
Haling or Hale: The Body in the Arts and Literature
Disease and the Problem of Evil in the Novels of Thomas Mann
Monstrosity and the Monstrous Revisited: Fortunio Liceti’s Medical Imagination
The Flesh of Wax: The Use of Scientific Collection in Medical Humanities
The Body between Life and Death: Berengario da Carpi and the Anatomical Image of the Sixteenth Century
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deijman and the Social History of the Brain
Secrets of the Dead
The Bio-Turn in History Writing: Death, Last Wishes, and Lasting Wishes
The Fatal Disease of the Last Reigning Inca: A Historical and Clinical Study
Paleopathology and Anthropology of the Renaissance: From the Morbus Dominorum to the Alleged ‘Michelangelo’s Shoes’
Reason, Affects and Madness
The New World Opened by Madness
Why Listen to the Mad? What Schizophrenic Girl Offers to Narrative Medicine
The Malady of Love in Early Modern Medical Thought
The Humanities in Medical Education
Art Images And Medical Teaching
Medical Humanities: A Tautology or a Necessity?
Teaching PTSD with Film: The Case of Peter Weir’s Fearless
The Humanities and Global Health: Travels with Philippa Foot and Karl Popper
Postface
Medical Humanities as a Search for Unity
Cumulative Bibliography
Index of Names
