Medical and Health Humanities

In this fascinating book, Johanna Emeney examines the global proliferation of new poetry related to illness and medical treatment from the perspective of doctors, patients, and carers in light of the growing popularity of the medical humanities. She provides a close analysis of poetry from New Zealand, the U.S., and the U.K. that deals with sociological and philosophical aspects of sickness, ailment, medical treatment, care, and recuperation.

A Body of Work includes poems by writers from the dawn of Enlightenment to the 21st Century and explores changing attitudes to medicine, health and the body. The book is divided into eight thematic sections, each of which includes a chronological range of poetry and excerpts of important historical and contextual medical writing. The sections are: Body as machine Nerves, mind, and brain Consuming Illness, disease, and disability Treatment Hospitals, practitioners, and professionals Sex, evolution, and reproduction Ageing and dying Includes work by such poets as: Dannie Abse, Maya Angelou, Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, John Burnside, Raymond Carver, Lucille Clifton, S. T. Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Mark Doty, T.S. Eliot, Paul Farley, Ann Finch, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Graves, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ted Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Paul Muldoon, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, John Addington Symonds, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams.

The purpose of medical humanities is to improve the delivery of effective health care through a better understanding of disease. Based on a highly successful seminar, this book provides a comprehensive and authoritative reference for what is becoming a professional requirement in medicine.

Original critical engagements at the intersection of the biomedical sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences 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 comprehensively introduce 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. 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