Books
Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities
Collection of essays edited with Rishi Goyal
Publisher’s Description
Charting shared advances across the emerging fields of medical humanities and health humanities, this book engages with the question of how biomedical knowledge is constructed, negotiated, and circulated as a cultural practice.
The volume is composed of a series of pathbreaking interdisciplinary essays that bring sociocultural habits of mind and modes of thought to the study of medicine, health and patients. These juxtapositions create new forms of knowledge, while emphasizing the vulnerability of human bodies, anti-essentialist approaches to biology, a sensitivity to language and rhetoric, and an attention to social justice.
These essays dissect the ways that cultural practices define the limits of health and the body: from the body's place and trajectory in the world to how bodies relate to one another, from questions about ageing and sex to what counts as health and illness.
Considering how these and other concepts are shaped by a negotiation between medico-scientific knowledge and ways of knowing derived from other domains, this book provides important new insights into how biomedical frameworks become settled forms for broader cultural understanding.
Praise for Culture and Medicine
‘An enlightening and concerned set of contributions by the next generation of scholars to grapple with the Health and Medical Humanities and their interrelationships with the practices, research tools and teaching of health sciences. New understandings, formulations and methods emerge, which illuminate biomedicine as a constellation of healthcare beliefs, practices, and cultural practices. Dynamic, scholarly, and clearly written.’
– Brian Hurwitz, D’Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine and the Arts, Department of English, Kings College London
Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading
Publisher’s Description
Today, we do not expect a symptomatic reading to refer to bodily symptoms, or a literary dissection to be more than metaphorical. But this was not always true.
In Romantic Autopsy, Arden Hegele considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find that the two fields collaborated to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Together, Romantic readers and doctors elaborated protocols of diagnosis-practices for interpretation that could be used to diagnose disease, and to understand fiction and poetry.
This volume puts essential works of British Romantic literature that seem at first to have little to do with medicine, such as the lyrics of William Wordsworth, the elegies of Percy Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, back into conversation with emergent medical disciplines of the period – anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology.
Poems and novels, Hegele argues, were historically understood through techniques designed for the analysis of disease; meanwhile, autopsy reports and case histories adopted stylistic features associated with literature.
Countering the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, these practices suggest that symptomatic reading (treating a text's superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still used and debated today, might have originated from Romantic diagnostics. The first study of the interconnected literary and medical analytics of British Romanticism, Romantic Autopsy charts an important history underlying our own approaches to literary analysis.
Praise for Romantic Autopsy
‘An exhilarating and original book that brings together lyric poetry, the novel, and the history of medicine, Arden Hegele's Romantic Autopsy makes a persuasive case for the shared ‘protocols of diagnosis’ that directed the reading of bodies and texts alike in the Romantic period. Hegele's illuminating close reading anchors a powerful argument for an interdisciplinary approach to literature and medicine that prioritizes form, figure, and genre. This is an exciting and impressive debut.’
– Daniel Wright, University of Toronto
‘With learning and verve, Romantic Autopsy redeems and revitalizes the practice of symptomatic reading, providing a subtle, sensitive account of the practice's late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century origins. Arden Hegele offers a persuasive and original account of how much the authors and the medical practitioners of this period learned from one another's diagnostic procedures as she recovers now-forgotten affinities between practices of interpretation and strategies of medical examination. This is a major contribution to both Romantic literary studies and the medical humanities’
– Deidre Lynch, Harvard University
‘Arden Hegele mobilizes startling original evidence that Romantic-era literary and clinical interpretations of illness and death arose together, entwined, irrevocably shaping one another, their shared textual practices giving voice to otherwise inarticulable thought. From early in its history, Hegele proposes, the practice of medicine has been fundamentally a narrative, and even poetic, act. Hegele's comprehensive scholarship supports her break-through findings, paving the way for even more fundamental discoveries about form, close reading, and healing. Simultaneously an authoritative reference work and a breath-taking conceptual flag planted in the fields of medical humanities and critical reading theory, Romantic Autopsy opens wide the quest for deepening the readings of the future.’
– Rita Charon, Columbia University