This authoritative new handbook offers a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the state of the medical humanities globally, showing how clinically oriented medical humanities, the critical study of medicine as a global historical and cultural phenomenon, and medicine as a force for cultural change can inform each other.

Composed of eight parts, the Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities looks at the medical humanities as:



a network and system
therapeutic
provocation
forms of resistance
a way of reconceptualising the medical curriculum
concerned with performance and narrative
mediated by artists as diagnosticians of culture through public engagement.

This book describes how the medical humanities can be used in and out of clinical settings, acting as a point of resistance, redistributing medicine’s capital amongst its stakeholders, embracing the complexity of medical instances, shaping medical education, promoting interdisciplinary understandings and recognising an identity for the medical humanities as a network effect. This book is an essential read for all students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in the medical humanities.