Description

---

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

About the Author

---

Anne Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, UK. She is the author of Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh, 2004) and Memory: New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2009). She has co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh, 2016), Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh, 2007) and W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh, 2004), as well as a special issue of Feminist Theory on feminism and affect. She has published articles on contemporary literature in a range of journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Contemporary Literature. Angela Woods is Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities at Durham University and Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, a large interdisciplinary research project on voice-hearing (auditory verbal hallucination) supported by the Wellcome Trust (2012-2020). She is the author of The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press, 2011) and has published in leading medical humanities and mental health journals including Schizophrenia Bulletin, Journal of Mental Health and The Lancet Psychiatry. Angela is Deputy Director of the Durham Centre for Medical Humanities and Associate Editor of the BMJ's Medical Humanities Journal. Sarah Atkinson is Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at King's College London. Jane Macnaughton is Professor of Medical Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. She became Deputy Head of the School of Medicine and Health in 2009. She has published in medical education, medical humanities, literature and medicine, history of medicine and health care environments, and she currently holds a Wellcome Senior Investigator Award for a project on The Life of Breath. Jennifer Richards is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Newcastle University. Her books include Rhetoric (Routledge 2007) and Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge 2003; 2007), and collections of essays for Edinburgh University Press, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan. She is currently working on a new monograph on the history of reading aloud in the English Renaissance, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship.