Literature And Medicine

Literature and Medicine: A Practical and Pedagogical Guide is designed to introduce narrative medicine in medical humanities courses aimed at pre-medicine undergraduates and medical and healthcare students. With excerpts from short stories, novels, memoirs, and poems, the book guides students on the basic methods and concepts of the study of narrative. The book helps healthcare professionals to build a set of skills and knowledge central to the practice of medicine including an understanding of professionalism, building the patient-physician relationship, ethics of medical practice, the logic of diagnosis, recognizing mistakes in medical practice, and diversity of experience. In addition to analyzing and considering the literary texts, each chapter includes a vignette taken from clinical situations to help define and illustrate the chapter’s theme. Literature and Medicine illustrates the ways that engagement with the humanities in general, and literature in particular, can create better and more fulfilled physicians and caretakers.

The experiences of health and illness, death and dying, the normal and the pathological have always been an integral part of literary texts. This volume considers how the two dynamic fields of medicine and literature have crossed over, and how they have developed alongside one another. It asks how medicine, as both science and practice, shapes the representation of illness and transforms literary form. It considers how literary texts across genres and languages of disease have put forward specific conceptions of medicine and impacted its practice. Taking into account the global, multilingual and multicultural contexts, this volume systematically outlines and addresses this double-sidedness of the literature-medicine connection. Literature and Medicine covers a broad spectrum of conceptual, thematic, theoretical, and methodological approaches that provide a solid foundation for understanding a vibrant interdisciplinary field.

Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literature: from the presence of tuberculosis in Franz Kafka's fiction or childbed fever in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to disease in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or in Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska; from the stories of Anton Chekhov and of William Carlos Williams, both doctors, to the poetry of nurses derived from their contrasting experiences. These are just a few examples of the cross-pollination between literature and medicine. It is no surprise, then, that courses in literature and medicine flourish in undergraduate curricula, medical schools, and continuing-education programs throughout the United States and Canada. This volume, in the MLA series Options for Teaching, presents a variety of approaches to the subject. It is intended both for literary scholars and for physicians who teach literature and medicine or who are interested in enriching their courses in either discipline by introducing interdisciplinary dimensions. The thirty-four essays in Teaching Literature and Medicine describe model courses; deal with specific texts, authors, and genres; list readings widely taught in literature and medicine courses; discuss the value of texts in both medical education and the practice of medicine; and provide bibliographic resources, including works in the history of medicine from classical antiquity.

This book is situated in the field of medical humanities, and the articles continue the dialogue between the disciplines of literature and medicine that was initiated in the 1970s and has continued with ebbs and flows since then. Recently, the need to renew that interdisciplinary dialogue between these two fields, which are both concerned with the human condition, has resurfaced in the face of institutional challenges, such as shrinking resources and the disappearance of many spaces devoted to the exchange of ideas between humanists and scientists. This volume presents cutting-edge research by scholars keen on not only maintaining but also enlivening that dialogue. They come from a variety of cultural, academic, and disciplinary backgrounds and their essays are organized in four thematic clusters: pedagogy, the mind-body connection, alterity, and medical practice.

This is the first study to examine the representation of illness, disability, and cultural pathologies in modern and contemporary Iberian and Latin American literature. Innovative and interdisciplinary, the collection situates medicine as an important and largely overlooked discourse in these literatures, while also considering the social, political, religious, symbolic, and metaphysical dimensions underpinning illness. Investigating how Hispanic and Lusophone writers have reflected on the personal and cultural effects of illness, it raises central questions about how medical discourses, cultural pathologies, and the art of healing in general are represented. Essays pay particular attention to the ways in which these interdisciplinary dialogues chart new directions in the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures, and emerging disciplines such as the medical humanities. Addressing a wide range of themes and subjects including bioethics, neuroscience, psychosurgery, medical technologies, Darwinian evolution, indigenous herbal medicine, the rising genre of the pathography, and the ‘illness as metaphor’ trope, the collection engages with the discourses of cultural studies, gender studies, disability studies, comparative literature, and the medical humanities. This book enriches and stimulates scholarship in these areas by showing how much we still have to gain from interdisciplinary studies working at the intersections between the humanities and the sciences.

First published in 1993, Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century analyses the close interplay of medicine and literature by paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of inner life. Although today, medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the ‘two cultures’ divide, this was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers, and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite. Locke, Smollett and Goldsmith were doctors, and physicians such as Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets. Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, this book uncovers the interconnections between medical and psychological theory and ideas of taste, beauty, and genius. Its contributors explore the rich cultural milieu of the period and investigate the ways in which medicine itself contributed to informing a gendered discourse of the world. This book will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and medical historians.

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a significant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press explores the relationship between the medical culture of Romantic-era Scotland and the periodical press by examining several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood?s Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential and innovative literary periodical of the era.