Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice.
In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection’s contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences.
With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, Health Humanities Reader truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness.
Foreword by: Mark Vonnegut Contributions by: Arthur W. Frank, David H. Flood, Rhonda L. Soricelli, Lisa Keränen, Michael Sappol, Shelley Wall, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Joseph N. Straus, Martin F. Norden, Lisa I. Iezzoni, Felicia Cohn, Martha Montello, John Lantos, Amy Haddad, Rebecca Garden, Mark Clark, Howard Brody, Rebecca J. Hester, Jack Coulehan, Rosemarie Tong, Sander L. Gilman, Bernice Hausman, Gretchen A. Case, Allen Peterkin, Alice Dreger, Marjorie Levine-Clark, Susan M. Squier, Rafael Campo, Sayantani DasGupta, Jonathan M. Metzl, Daniel Goldberg, Maren Grainger-Monsen, Thomas R. Cole, Benjamin Saxton, E. Ann Kaplan, Jerald Winakur, Bradley Lewis, Anne Hudson Jones, Michael Rowe, Ian Williams, Tod Chambers, Raymond C. Barfield, Lucy Selman, Jeffrey P. Bishop, Audrey Shafer, Catherine Belling, Paul Root Wolpe, Allison B. Kavey, Jeff Nisker, Julie M. Aultman, Michael Blackie, Erin Gentry Lamb, Alan Bleakley, Jay Baruch
