The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.
William Osler
Health humanities in English Department: Implications
Health humanities is an emerging interdisciplinary field that examines the interaction and intersection of humanities (such as literature, history, philosophy, ethics, and the arts) with health/illness. It encompasses various disciplinary contexts and departments—for instance, health anthropology, medical sociology, public health, medicine, health economics, and religion among others. Unlike medical practice which focuses on the scientific and clinical aspects of illness, health humanities recognizes the value of biographical, social, and cultural dimensions of the illness experience. By doing so, health humanities sheds light on the often ignored, understated, or unsaid aspects of illness. As Martyn Evans puts it, health humanities is “an integrated, interdisciplinary, and substantially philosophical approach to recording and interpreting human experiences of illness, disability, medicine and health care” (509). Patient and social movements (such as disability rights movements) in the 1960s and 70s, the recognition of the importance of patient-centred care, the role of cultural competence, the narrative medicine movement along with the recent medical developments have paved the way for the growing prominence of health humanities.
However, when health humanities is taught in an English/Cultural Studies department, it serves a unique purpose that distinguishes it from the integration of humanities in medical curricula. The broad objectives of health humanities courses taught through an English/Cultural Studies department are (a) to analyse through close reading and other modes (for instance, reparative reading[1]) the representational politics and cultural logics of disease conditions through the study of the visual/textual/oral narratives of patients/(paid/unpaid) caregivers and medical professionals (b) to study the narrative (narrator, voice, structure, etc.) and figurative aspects of the illness narratives (c) and, to investigate the ethical stakes of both storytelling and listening. Put differently, health humanities treats health/illness/medicine as a cultural phenomenon shaped by practices, discourses, and beliefs, and also concentrates on interpreting disease and illness culturally.
In contrast, the same course taught through a medical school would emphasize on improving the core physician skills (such as observation, tolerance for ambiguity, clinical empathy, communication, listening skills etc.) through reading and reflecting on the literary/cultural/visual texts among others. A crucial element here is the personalizing of the medical experience in order to make it more human-centred. In fact, aligning with the global trends, the Medical Council of India (MCI) has in recent times integrated Health Humanities into the MBBS curriculum as a foundational core course. Humanities in Medical Education by Rajiv Mahajan and Tejinder Singh provides a comprehensive overview of the role and the need for humanities in Indian medical education.
Designing the Syllabus: Challenges and Insights
Health humanities can be taught in multiple ways, including but not limited to medium approach (comics, films, verbal narratives, paintings, etc.), period approach (colonial/ postcolonial, 18th century, 19th century etc.), region/geography approach (India, Canada, South Asian, etc.), disease approach (HIV/AIDS, polio, TB etc.), thematic approach (bio-capitalism, medical pluralism, pharamaceuticalization, epidemics, organ transplantation), archives/medical histories and social histories of disease/organs (such as Skin by Claudia Benthien) among others.
Designing a health humanities syllabus in Indian/South Asian contexts also involves negotiating with vernacular/regional language literatures on health/illness narratives, as well as with English texts in translation and those originally written in English. Unlike the west (the USA/UK/Canada) where primary/secondary sources on/in health humanities are typically in English language, India has a rich cultural tradition and a number of languages. Thus, as an instructor, one has to be mindful of the diverse cultural traditions and languages present in India while determining the texts to be included in the syllabus. To address this challenge, as an instructor, I have chosen to include books originally written in English (for example, Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom), as well as translations of works in other languages (for example, translation of Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Odiya short story “Rebati”). This approach ensures that the syllabus is inclusive and accessible to a wide range of students. The guiding principle should be to examine how Indian/South Asian literary imagination has influenced and shaped a unique approach to the practices and ideas of health humanities.
I teach a survey-level graduate course titled Health Humanities that consists of five untitled modules and is taught through the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (English) at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. Each module focuses on a specific aspect of health humanities, including the principles and theories of health humanities, physical and mental illness, disability studies, pandemics/epidemics, and health representation across media.
My institution as well as the students welcomed such an interdisciplinary course. This course has now been incorporated into the MA syllabus as an open elective and is also a core course for PhD students who are pursuing their doctoral work in Health Humanities. In addition to this, some health-related topics are covered under “graphic medicine” in another undergraduate (B. Tech.) Open Elective course that I offer, titled Introduction to Comics Studies. This course is designed to cater to the diverse interests of students pursuing programs in Cultural Studies/English literature, as well as those studying engineering/science (with minor modifications tailored specifically for B. Tech. students). The overarching objectives of this discussion-based course are threefold: (a) to introduce how literary/visual cultures conceptualize bodies, health, and illness, (b) to gain insight into how the arts and culture influence and shape human condition, and (c) to delineate the wider social implications of medicine through various literary and media forms. This is a 3-credit course that runs for 45 hours and draws on multimedia and interdisciplinary archive to address these objectives. The course ran for approximately 12-13 weeks, spread across three sessions per week, each lasting 50 minutes.
Here I am sharing my pedagogical practices and reading list which I believe can provide a valuable foundation for anyone interested in exploring the intersection between health and the humanities. In this foundational course, I teach a diverse selection of Indian and western texts across various media to provide a comprehensive learning experience. Given that health humanities is a relatively new field in India, the syllabus should include and balance both Indian and Western texts, and also consider what sets Indian Health Humanities apart. Further, exposure both to western and non-western texts also helps students develop a comparative perspective of the issues related to health. The instructor may choose to use (a) primary sources in full/excerpts as well as, (b) research essays/book chapters/books for intensive and extensive reading. Finally, as with any syllabus, there is always the possibility of overlooking important texts.
Unit one
In the initial classes, I shall provide a working knowledge of the operative terms of health humanities such as “health,” “illness,” “disability,” “disease,” “sickness,” and “well-being.” In order to do so, I prescribe excerpts from The Illness Narratives by Arthur Kleinman, Eric J. Cassell’s essay “Illness and Disease,” and Michael Bury’s “Chronic Illness as Biographical disruption.” I shall also introduce some essays from the first issue of Literature and Medicine (1982) journal published by Johns Hopkins University which articulates the major concerns, scope, and representational practices of health humanities. Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” and Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic will be introduced at various junctures of the course. We particularly liked Woolf’s “On Being Ill” which offered a rich source of thought-provoking discussion, such as her assertion that “illness has not . . . taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy as one of the prime themes of literature” (3-4). Here Woolf emphatically argues that illness has not received the same level of attention as love, war, and jealousy in literature. This assertion prompts reflection on the importance of illness and its depiction in literary works, as well as within the broader field of health humanities.
After introducing the key terms, I shall provide a brief overview of the evolution of health humanities in the west. Although the terms medical humanities, health humanities, and critical health humanities are often used interchangeably, they have a distinct scope that should be clarified. While the scope of medical humanities is limited to doctor-patient interaction and on improving medical education/clinical practice, health humanities embraces a variety of perspectives including that of a patient and a caregiver. Critical health humanities, on the other hand, is premised on the posthuman idea of species health and an intense examination of social, cultural, ethical, and political dimensions of health/illness. The introductory chapter of The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities edited by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods provides a valuable resource for introducing these three phases of health humanities. I also assign introductory chapters from Medical Humanities: An Introduction edited by Thomas R. Cole, Ronald A. Carson, and Nathan S. Carlin, as well as the Health Humanities Reader edited by Delese Wear, Lester D. Friedman, and Therese Jones. “Why Medical Humanities?” an essay by Upreet Dhaliwal published in RHiME adds a unique Indian perspective to the module.
Unit two
The objective of this module is to arrive at the non-clinical aspects of illness, compare different concepts of health (comparative health humanities) and also, to introduce the narrative and figurative aspects of illness narratives. To these ends, I introduce The Wounded Storyteller by Arthur Frank and his elaboration of three narrative modes: restitution, chaos, and quest narratives. Frank’s ideas will be tested alongside Yuvraj Singh’s The Test of My Life, a celebrity illness narrative that employs restitution tropes. Additionally, we also read excerpts from Manisha Koirala’s Healed: How Cancer Gave Me A New Life . While these narratives are not fully representative of cancer as experienced by an “ordinary” sick person, they offer provocative examples for discussing the social aspects of health such as class, social power, and financial resources, on health outcomes.
Mental illnesses, on the other hand, are critically misinterpreted and are fraught with stereotypes and misconceptions. This is particularly true in India where mental illness is often misread as personal weakness, forcing the sufferers to feel shame and self-blame. Despite the concerted efforts by the government and by various NGOs, mental illness remains a significant public health concern in India. We read excerpts of William Styron’s Darkness Visible, Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, and Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom (fiction). Using these texts, we discussed stigma and discrimination, coping mechanisms and recovery, as well as questions of identity and self-reflection in relation to mental illness. The boldness of these representations deeply moved the students leading to an environment of openness and expansion of perspectives.
Unit three
The objective of this module is to introduce different study approaches to disability art and cultural practices. I will cover the differences between medical and social models of disability, develop a comprehensive vocabulary to describe various disability conditions (such as normal, ableism, inclusive design, access etc.) and finally, investigate how the disabled are portrayed in arts and literature. We will read the introductory chapter from Lennard J Davis’s The Disability Studies Reader. Davis’s “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies” published in the American Literary History is particularly useful in that the essay makes a case for the centrality of disability studies scholarship in literary studies. One of the primary goals of this module is also to challenge the globalizing tendencies of western disability discourses and to ground such discourses within the socio-political contexts of India.
Disability studies in India has made substantial progress in terms of availability of primary and secondary sources. Some resources on disability that the prospective instructor may consider consulting include: Disability in Translation: The Indian Experience edited by Someshwar Sati, G.J.V. Prasad, Reclaiming the Disabled Subject: Representing Disability in Short Fiction (Volume 1) edited by Someshwar Sati, GJV Prasad, and Ryswick Bhattacharjee, Rethinking Disability in India by Anita Ghai, and Disability Studies: An Introduction by Banibrata Mahanta. I introduce the film Margarita with a Straw (2014) followed by Preeti Monga’s The Other Senses (2012), and Firdaus Kanga’s fictionalized autobiography, Trying to Grow (2008) to discuss disability, desire and identity. These works offer valuable insights into disability from different perspectives and help broaden students understanding of the experiences of people with disabilities.
Unit four
This module will examine key concepts related to pandemics (such as cholera, HIV/AIDS, COVID-19), epidemics, and endemics. In fact, the outbreak of COVID-19 has sparked a renewed interest in the pandemic and plague literatures. Two guiding questions inform this module—what does it mean that epidemics are partially social constructs? , and how do literary and cultural texts negotiate and represent epidemics? Charles E. Rosenberg’s “What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective” and “Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History,” in Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine was discussed in the class not only to evolve a working definition of pandemics but also to delineate the characteristics of modern pandemics Additionally, by examining pandemics through an intersectional perspective, I aim to shed light on the intricate web of interconnected factors (such as caste, religion, colonialism, gender, and class) that influence health. To facilitate this examination, I introduce Rabindranath Tagore’s short novel Chaturanga (tran. “Quartet”) which looks at the intersection of pandemics and religion,and Rajinder Singh Bedi’s short story “Quarantine” that studies pandemics and caste.
While the excerpts of the classical texts such as Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic and The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum are useful to initiate discussion on pandemics, books/essays by David Arnold (for instance, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine, and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India or Pandemic India: From Cholera to Covid-19) deepen our understanding of pandemics in Indian/South Asian contexts. Particularly, the second chapter in The Birth of the Clinic titled “A Political Consciousness” is useful in that it provides valuable insights not only into the differences between ‘endemic’ and ‘pandemic’ but also in cultivating students’ understanding of the relationship between political power and individual/collective health. By incorporating the concept of biopolitics, the discussion expands to encompass the ways in which power structures influence the management of health at both the individual and collective levels.
To support my discussion, I will draw on a range of primary texts including Fakir Mohan Senapati’s “Rebati” which discusses cholera, a common epidemic in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century India; “The Sultan’s Battery,” a short story on STD by Aravind Adiga; Master Bhagwandas’s “The Plague-Witch” and Arundhati Roy’s essay “‘The Pandemic is a Portal.” The recently published Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence by Nishi Pulugurtha and Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation by Sathyaraj Venkatesan et. al. are useful books in the study of pandemics.
Unit five
The objective of this module is to offer a perspective about media affordances and how these are utilized to represent illnesses. Through an exploration of diverse forms of media, including web series, films, advertisements, comics, and new-age digital formats, students gain a comprehensive understanding of how health and illness are represented in different media forms. They also examine how media as a significant force (for instance, raising awareness, influencing health behaviours etc.) shapes perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours towards health and illness. While there are several media texts that could be presented under this module, I particularly introduce the following: the web series Breath (on organ transplantation), Vipul Amrutlal Shah’s television series Human (on pharmaceuticals) and films such as Phir Milenge (on HIV/AIDS), Black (on blindness and Alzheimer’s), and Munnabhai MBBS (to discuss doctor-patient relationship). The graphic narrative Menstrupedia by Aditi Gupta and Tuhin Paul provides a platform for discussing sensitive topics such as the stigma and body shame related to menstruation, and also prompts reflections on the role of comics in healthcare settings and beyond. Finally, I shall introduce a few advertisements to discuss a range of health-related issues such as hygiene, disease-mongering, and commercial interests. Students watch/read these materials eventually leading to collective close reading and media analysis from multiple levels such as film’s content/approach, health campaign, and public health infographic/challenges. One of the useful texts in this context is Research Methods in Health Humanities (2019). Edited by Craig M. Klugman and Erin Gentry Lamb and published by the Oxford University Press, Research Methods in Health Humanities while surveying the history of health humanities also offers guidance on how to conduct research on various media including archives, paintings, films, and comics. The aforementioned media texts are solely based on my personal interest. Prospective instructors may choose any media forms and related texts as per the learning objectives, availability of resources, and class size, among others.
Assignments and Assessments
The prospective instructor may include a range of assignments with different weightage. While traditional assessments such as group/individual oral presentations and (open/close) examinations are common, the instructor can develop a range of interesting assignments like field trips to hospitals for patient-doctor interviews, creation of short videos, debates (for instance, on euthanasia), role plays, podcasts, and case studies, among others. The course instructor may also invite a guest speaker to discuss relevant topics and themes of the course.
My course followed a continuous evaluation system consisting of four assessments: (a) oral presentation, (b) mid-semester open book examination, (c) studio hour, and (d) a short close reading assignment. Collectively, these assessments fostered active participation, encouraged critical engagement, and facilitated a holistic understanding of the key concepts of health humanities among the students.
One of the most intriguing assessments is the studio hour which encourages students to draw/write about their own experiences of illness in the form of critical/creative/visual work (such as creating a documentary film, writing a play, developing a public art installation, drawing comics, writing poems etc.). The following prompts were designed to encourage reflective thinking among students regarding their health-related experiences/insights related to their illnesses: (a) reflect on the emotions you experienced during your illness journey, (b) reflect on the ways in which your perspective on life, health, and mortality has changed as a result of your illness, (c) consider the broader societal or cultural implications of your illness, and (d) how can you use your creative work to raise awareness, challenge stereotypes, or generate conversations about illness-related issues? These prompts are just a starting point, as there are many more questions that can further facilitate self-reflection and exploration of the unique health-related experiences of the students. At the end of the semester, the creative works of the students are curated and presented in a class exhibition, providing them with an opportunity to share their experiences and receive feedback from their peers. During the class exhibition, they share their work and discuss with peers, further exploring the course material. Peers offer feedback, thought-provoking questions, and expand the student’s understanding of illnesses. This reflective activity has proven to be a valuable and meaningful way for students to engage with the course material and connect with others in the class.
Coda
Although medical humanities as a term was adumbrated in 1948 by the historian George Sarton in an obituary column published in the journal ISIS, it gained prominence only in the 1970s in the USA and 1990s in the UK. In India, the field of health humanities is still in its early stages of development, with relatively few practitioners and limited awareness among the general public. Nonetheless, there are some promising signs of progress. Through my course, Health Humanities, I aim to introduce students to the essential tools (such as critical analysis, interdisciplinary approaches, media affordances and narrative forms), research methodologies, and major texts of Health Humanities. By doing so, the course places a strong emphasis on critical thinking, urging students to challenge the Eurocentric paradigms of health, and consider and reflect on the socio-cultural realities of India, including how they might shape and intersect with health and illness.
Select Health Humanities journals
Literature and Medicine
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
Medical Humanities
Journal of Medical Humanities
Health
Asian Bioethics Review
Hastings Center Report
Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine
Indian Journal of Medical Ethics
Indian Journal of Critical Disability Studies
Research and Humanities in Medical Education
Select websites
Graphic medicine: <https://www.graphicmedicine.org/>
Literature, Arts, Medicine Database:<https://medhum.med.nyu.edu>
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology: <http://somatosphere.net/>
Narrative Medicine: <https://www.mhe.cuimc.columbia.edu/our-divisions/division-
narrative-medicine>
Synapsis: <https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/>
PubMed: <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/>
Medicine and Muse program, Stanford University: < https://med.stanford.edu/medicineandthemuse/about.html>
The Medical Humanities Colloquy, IIT Gandhinagar: < https://hss.iitgn.ac.in/project/medical-humanities-colloquy-1/>
Archive of Science Gallery’s Second Digital Exhibition: <https://bengaluru.sciencegallery.com/psyche-archive>
BMJ Blogs and Opinion: <https://www.bmj.com/news/opinion>
The Polyphony: https://thepolyphony.org/.
Works cited
Adiga, Aravind. “The Sultan’s Battery.” Between the Assassinations. Simon and Schuster, 2009.
Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. University of California Press, 1993.
Banerjee, Ishani, et al., writers. Human. Directed by Vipul Amrutlal Shah and Mozez Singh, 14 January 2022. Disney+Hotstar.
Benthien, Claudia. Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World. Columbia University Press, 2002.
Bedi, Rajinder Singh. “Quarantine.” Orientalia Suecana, vol. 69, 2020, pp 42-48.
Bhagwandas, ‘Master.’ “The Plague-Witch.” Medical Maladies: Stories of Disease and Cure from Indian Languages, edited by Haris Qadeer, Niyogi Publisher, 2023, pp. 269–287.
Bhansali, Sanjay Leela, writer. Black. Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Applause Entertainment SLB Films and Yash Raj Films, 4 February 2005.
Bose, Shonali, director. Margarita with a Straw, Netflix, 2015, https://www.netflix.com/in/title/80018695?source=35. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.
Bury, Michael. “Chronic Illness as Biographical Disruption.” Sociology of Health and Illness, vol. 4, no. 2, 1982, pp. 167–182., https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.ep11339939.
Cassell, Eric J. “Illness and Disease.” The Hastings Center Report, vol. 6, no. 2, 1976, pp. 27-37. https://doi.org/10.2307/3561497.
Cole, Thomas R., et al. Medical Humanities: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Crawford, Paul, et al. The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities. Routledge, 2020.
Davis, Lennard J. “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies.” American Literary History, vol. 11, no. 3, 1999, pp. 500–12. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/490130. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.
—.“Introduction: Disability, Normality and Power.” The Disability Studies Reader, Routledge, 2017, pp. 1–16.
Dhaliwal, Upreet. “Why Medical Humanities?” RHiME, vol. 1, 2014.
Evans, Martyn. “Reflections on the Humanities in Medical Education.” Medical Education, vol. 36, no. 6, 2002, pp. 508–513., https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2923.2002.01225.x.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. Routledge, 2012.
—.The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London, 1976.
Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Ghai, Anita. Rethinking Disability in India. Routledge India, 2015.
Girija, K. P. Mapping the History of Ayurveda: Culture, Hegemony and the Rhetoric of Diversity. Routledge India, 2021.
Gupta, Aditi, and Tuhin Paul. Menstrupedia Comic: A Friendly Guide to Periods for Girls. Menstrupedia, 2021.
Honigsbaum, Mark. The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris. WW Norton & Company, 2019.
Hirani, Rajkumar, et al., writers. Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. Directed by Rajkumar Hirani, AA Films, 19 December 2003.
Jamison, Kay Redfield, and Solomon. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. Picador, 2015.
Jurecic, Ann. Illness as Narrative. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
Jones, Therese, et al. Health Humanities Reader. Rutgers University Press, 2014.
Kanga, Firdaus. Trying to Grow. India, Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 2018.
Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. Basic Books, 1988.
Koirala, Manisha. Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life. Penguin, 2018.
Klugman, Craig M., and Erin Gentry Lamb, editors. Research Methods in Health Humanities. Oxford University Press, 2019. Literature and Medicine, vol. 1, no. 1, 1982, pp. 37–37.
Mahajan, Rajiv, and Tejinder Singh. Humanities in Medical Education. CBS Publishers and Distributors, 2020.
Mahanta, Banibrata. Disability Studies: An Introduction. Yking Books, 2017.
Monga, Preeti. Other Senses: An Inspiring True Story of a Visually Impaired. Roli Books, 2012.
Osler, William. Aequanimitas: With Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine. Blakiston Company, 1904.
Pinto, Jerry. Em and the Big Hoom. Penguin, 2015.
Pulugurtha, Nishi, ed. Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence. Taylor and Francis, 2022.
Qadeer, Haris, editor. Medical Maladies: Stories of Disease and Cure from Indian Languages. Niyogi Publisher, 2023.
Rosenberg, Charles E. “What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective.” Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 2, 1989, pp. 1-17.
Rosenberg, Charles E., and Janet Lynne Golden, editors. “Framing Disease: Illness, Society and History.” Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine, Cambridge University Press. 1992.
Roy, Arundhati. “The Pandemic is a Portal.” Financial Times, vol. 3 no. 4, 2020, pp 45.
Sabharwal, Atul, writer. Phil Milenge. Directed by Revathi, Percept Picture Company, 27 August 2004.
Sati, Someshwar, and G J V Prasad. Disability in Translation: The Indian Experience. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.
Sati, Someshwar, et al. Reclaiming the Disabled Subject: Representing Disability in Short Fiction. Bloomsbury India, 2022.
Senapati, Fakir Mohan. “Rebati.” Fakir Mohan Senapati Stories. Translated by Paul St-Pierre, Grassroots, 2003.
Singh, Yuvraj, et al. The Test of My Life: From Cricket to Cancer and Back. Random House Publishers India, 2013.
Sharma, Mayank., and Abhijeet Deshpande, writers. Breathe. Directed by Mayank Sharma, Abundantia Entertainment, 26 January 2018. Amazon Video.
Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Vintage, 1992.
Venkatesan, Sathyaraj, et al., editors. Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation. Springer, 2022.
Whitehead, Anne, and Angela Woods, editors. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Woolf, Virginia. On Being Ill. Paris Press, 2012.
[1] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick introduced the concept of “reparative reading,” challenging “paranoid reading.” This alternative perspective emphasizes a hermeneutic of empathy and positive engagement, contrasting with the suspicious and negative affects associated with paranoid reading. While paranoid reading tends to focus solely on problematic elements within a text, reparative reading seeks a more holistic comprehension of the text. In health humanities, reparative reading refers to a compassionate and humanistic approach that involves placing trust in both the narrator (the suffering self) and the narrative (illness narrative). This method of interpretation encourages empathy and understanding towards the text. For more on this, see Illness as Narrative by Ann Jurecic.
