Ebook: The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities

A field-defining collection of original critical engagements at the intersection of the biomedical sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences

• The Introduction and 8 of the chapters in this Companion are Open Access. Click on the Resources tab below to access them.

In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area.

Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performance, the postcolonial, public health, touch, twins, voice and wonder.

Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge and make a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience.

Want to tweet about this book? Use #ECCMH.

Key Features

• Offers an introduction to the second wave of the field of the medical humanities
• Positions the humanities not as additive to medicine but as making a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might think about individual, subjective and embodied experience
• Exemplifies the commitment of the critical medical humanities to genuinely interdisciplinary thinking by stimulating multi-disciplinary dialogue around key areas of debate within the field
• Presents thirty-six original chapters from leading and emergent scholars in the field, who are defining its new critical edge