Elements in Health Humanities – serie

Literature and War Medicine argues for the centrality of armed conflict in cultural histories of health and medicine. The emerging field of health humanities has, in the main, not engaged substantively with the burgeoning signifying practices that thematize the many pathologies-physical, psychological, and social-engendered by war. Histories of military conflicts and their attendant medical advances have been and will continue to be written, but how can health humanists theorize injury, healing, and disablement by closely reading literary narratives that grapple with these historical moments? How can novels, memoirs, and short stories that represent war medicine-and sustained attention to their formal properties-provide an alternative avenue for bioethical and biopolitical inquiry? Literature and War Medicine appraises contemporary literature representing medicine, illness, and disability amidst the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, WWI, WWII, postcolonial civil wars in Asia and Africa, the Global War on Terror, and the occupation of Palestine.

Literature and War Medicine argues for the centrality of armed conflict in cultural histories of health and medicine. The emerging field of health humanities has, in the main, not engaged substantively with the burgeoning signifying practices that thematize the many pathologies-physical, psychological, and social-engendered by war. Histories of military conflicts and their attendant medical advances have been and will continue to be written, but how can health humanists theorize injury, healing, and disablement by closely reading literary narratives that grapple with these historical moments? How can novels, memoirs, and short stories that represent war medicine-and sustained attention to their formal properties-provide an alternative avenue for bioethical and biopolitical inquiry? Literature and War Medicine appraises contemporary literature representing medicine, illness, and disability amidst the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, WWI, WWII, postcolonial civil wars in Asia and Africa, the Global War on Terror, and the occupation of Palestine.

The clinical encounter is typically divided into medical interventions for body/ brain and psychotherapeutic interventions for mind/ emotions. In recent years, medical and psychotherapy education have undergone radical pedagogic (negative) transformations - justified on economic grounds. These have resulted in the adoption of a reductive instrumental values focus at the expense of education of deeper values: the historical, ethical, aesthetic, political, and transcendental (meaning). Observable competences displace assessment of potential as capabilities, where an education into professional identity through innovative curriculum design has been reduced to a set of syllabi producing technicians. In turn, this promotes focus on managed curriculum content over emergent process. Transformation in professional education is imperative, where innovative production of metaphor is seen to challenge a dominant reductive literalism. Poetry, embedded within a wider poetic imagination, provides the necessary medium through which a multiple values-based medicine and psychotherapy of quality may be restored.