Speaker: Megan Coyer, Lecturer of English Literature, University of Glasgow
Respondent: Cristobal Silva, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
As a set of disciplines, the humanities face the challenge of how to write about embodied experiences that resist easy verbal categorization such as illness, pain, and healing. The recent emergence of interdisciplinary frameworks such as narrative medicine goes some way to address these challenges. Yet conceptualizing a field of medical humanities also offers a broader umbrella under which to study the influence of medico-scientific ideas and practices on society. Whether by incorporating material culture such as medical artefacts, performing symptomatic readings of poems and novels, or excavating the implicit medical assumptions underlying auditory cultures, the approaches that emerge from a historiographical or interpretive framework are different from those coming from the physician’s black bag.
This event is part of the series, Explorations in the Medical Humanities.
Sponsored by The Society of Fellows in the Humanities, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Center for Science and Society.
