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 introduce comprehensively 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. Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performance, the postcolonial, public health, touch, twins, voice and wonder. Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge and make a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience.

About the Author
Anne Whitehead, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Angela Woods, Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities, Durham University. Sarah Atkinson, Senior Lecturer, King's College London. Jane Macnaughton, Professor of Medical Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University. Jennifer Richards, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, Newcastle University.


Book Information
ISBN 9781399508858
Author Anne Whitehead
Format Paperback
Page Count 700
Imprint Edinburgh University Press
Publisher Edinburgh University Press