Historicity, Historiography, and Hope

Historicity is a key epistemological component of the definition of “science” proposed by authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, and partially accepted by the Brazilian Collective Health builders. What we call the “historicity awareness” of Collective Health is the field’s recognition that there is no knowledge of health without history and that its history interferes with its results, with the conceptualization of its objects, its cognitive and technological practices, and the feasibility of its promises of enhancing the quality of life towards an equal society. This helps explain why Humanities in general and History, in particular, are ubiquitous to Health Education, where they are known as Health and Medical Humanities or, as is more usual in Brazil, Human and Social Sciences in Health. They helped to imagine an equitable health care system of which the concrete manifestation, however imperfect, is the Brazilian Unified National Health System, the SUS. Health Humanities, Medical Humanities, and History of Science and Technology are all interdisciplinary fields that challenge historiography and theory of history to look beyond the borders of our normative understanding of the historian’s professional identity – which legitimacy is achieved through specific academic training – to properly evaluate the multiple expressions of society’s relationships and engagements with history and time.

Mapping Reproductive Health Policy Using Arts-Based Research Methods: A Model of Pedagogical Transgression

This chapter presents a model and a qualitative analysis of an applied health humanities assignment that used arts-based methods to introduce health science undergraduates to the intersectional barriers connected to reproductive health policy in the U.S.

Spaces of Care and Graphic Medicine

While there are several studies that focus on care settings in relation to verbal narratives, only a few studies have paid attention to how comics in general, and graphic medicine in particular, engage critical care environments and settings. Drawing strengths from the underground and alternative comics and capitalizing on health humanities, graphic medicine, a recent development in the comics genre, concentrates on the issues related to health, illness, and care. Coined by Ian Williams in 2007, graphic medicine refers to the intersection of comics and concerns of healthcare. Graphic medicine has always engaged informal, formal, and biomedical caregiving settings. Against this backdrop, the present article, drawing on relevant theoretical debates on spatial studies and care, examines Stan Mack’s Janet& Me (2004), Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits (2014), and Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (2012). In so doing, the article seeks to delineate care facilities (family, hospitals, among others) and their impact on patients.

Lessons for Humanities and Arts in Gerontology and Geriatrics Curricula From the Medical and Health Humanities

The role of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Gerontology in gerontology and geriatrics curricula finds a metaphor in the rapidly evolving field of medical and health humanities, with which this author has been involved for three decades. Behind the call for increasing humanities and arts scholarship in the pedagogy of both fields lies the challenge of establishing an interdisciplinary nexus of scholarship that avoids the challenges of dilettantism and gestures such as providing lists of novels and movies. This presentation draws on the presenter's bibliometric research in the medical and health humanities which indicates authorship in the majority to be either solely from the humanities or from healthcare, with little indication of joint working in either authorship or acknowledgements (the scholar's courtesy), and explores the background issues of academic culture with a view to proposing solutions to elevate the inclusion of humanities and arts as a significant element of gerontology education.

Coda

The coda extends the relationship between nineteenth-century techniques of medico-literary exegesis to reading practices in the present day. The four mobile protocols discussed in the book—dissective reading, the postmortem, free indirect style, and semiological diagnostics—offer a new portrait of the cultural interchange between Romantic literary and medical fields. They also set the stage for contemporary reading practices, especially symptomatic reading. The coda argues that the much-maligned practice of symptomatic reading might be rehabilitated through a reconsideration of the history of its origins in Romantic protocols of diagnosis, which anticipate present-day debates in literary analysis about the ethics of critique. In dialogue with the medical and health humanities, the coda offers an optimistic reconsideration of symptomatic reading as a rich, transhistorical instance of how literary scholarship might draw on and inform the medical sciences.

Health Humanities curriculum and evaluation in health professions education: a scoping review

Background The articulation of learning goals, processes and outcomes related to health humanities teaching currently lacks comparability of curricula and outcomes, and requires synthesis to provide a basis for developing a curriculum and evaluation framework for health humanities teaching and learning. This scoping review sought to answer how and why the health humanities are used in health professions education. It also sought to explore how health humanities curricula are evaluated and whether the programme evaluation aligns with the desired learning outcomes. Methods A focused scoping review of qualitative and mixed-methods studies that included the influence of integrated health humanities curricula in pre-registration health professions education with programme evaluate of outcomes was completed. Studies of students not enrolled in a pre-registration course, with only ad-hoc health humanities learning experiences that were not assessed or evaluated were excluded. Four databases were searched (CINAHL), (ERIC), PubMed, and Medline. Results The search over a 5 year period, identified 8621 publications. Title and abstract screening, followed by full-text screening, resulted in 24 articles selected for inclusion. Learning outcomes, learning activities and evaluation data were extracted from each included publication. Discussion Reported health humanities curricula focused on developing students’ capacity for perspective, reflexivity, self- reflection and person-centred approaches to communication. However, the learning outcomes were not consistently described, identifying a limited capacity to compare health humanities curricula across programmes. A set of clearly stated generic capabilities or outcomes from learning in health humanities would be a helpful next step for benchmarking, clarification and comparison of evaluation strategy.

Digital hermeneutics: scaled readings of online depression discourses

When it comes to understanding experiences of illness, humanities and social sciences research have traditionally reserved a prominent role for narrative. Yet, depression has characteristics that withstand the form of traditional narratives, such as a lack of desire and an impotence to act. How can a ‘datafied’ approach to online forms of depression writing pose a valuable addition to existing narrative approaches in health humanities? In this article, we analyse lay people’s depression discourses online. Our approach, ‘digital hermeneutics’, is inspired by Gadamer’s dialogical hermeneutics. It consists of a ‘scaled reading’ on five different scales: platform hermeneutics; contextual reading with term frequency—inverse document frequency (TF–IDF); distant reading with natural language processing topic modelling; hyper-reading with concordance views and close reading. Our corpus consisted of three data sets, from the blogs and message boards of, respectively, time-to-change.org.uk, a UK-based social organisation and movement that aims to counter mental health discrimination and alleviate social isolation by spreading awareness; Sane.org.uk, a leading UK mental health charity that seeks to help people in facing the challenges of mental illness and to improve quality of life; and the subreddit ‘r/depression’ on web discussion platform reddit. We found that the manner in which people express experiences of illness online is very much dependent on the specific affordances of platforms. We found degrees of ‘narrativity’ to be correlated to authorship and identity markers: the less ‘anonymous’ the writing, generally speaking, the more conventionally ‘narrative’ it was. Pseudonimity was related to more intimate and singular forms, with less pressure to conform to socially accepted and positive narratives of the ‘restitution’ type. We also found that interactive affordances of the platforms were used to a limited extent, nuancing assumptions about the polyvocality of online depression writing. We conclude by making a claim for increased cooperation between digital and medical humanities that might lead to a field of ‘Digital Medical Humanities’.

Volume 13, 2021 Number 1: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 2: Special Articles on Health Humanities and General Articles Volume 12, 2020 Number 1: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 2: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 3: Special Collection on “India and Travel Narratives”, guest-edited by Ms. Somdatta Mandal, PhD Number 4: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 5: 1st RIOC Conference Issue Number 6: Special Articles on Health Humanities and General Articles Volume 11, 2019 Number 1: (Special Issue on Human Rights and Literature, guest-edited by Prof. Pramod K. Nayar) Number 2: General Issue Number 3: General Issue Volume 10, 2018 Number 1: (Special Issue on “Interrogating Cultural Translation: Literature and Fine Arts in Translation and Adaptation”, in collaboration with the Department of English, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham) Number 2: (On Frankenstein 200, 1818-2018 and the General Areas) Number 3: (General Issue) All Issues>> Of Crows and Humans: The Affective Economy of Mourning and Grieving

This paper aims to examine the representation of animals in Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), a multi-awarded novel about an academic’s struggles on coping with the grief of losing his wife. Previous scholarship on Grief is the Thing with Feathers focuses on an anthropocentric approach to grief and melancholia. However, I argue these emotions can be approached through an examination of the Crow, a fantastical talking bird who makes itself known during the funeral, against the human protagonists of the novel. My approach focuses on how the Crow manages to facilitate what Sara Ahmed calls an “affective economy” which aids the human characters to process their emotions. I critically analyze in this paper how the novel blurs the boundary that separates the human and beasts through its representation of animal emotion. I speculate on how the moments of encounter between the crow and humans emphasize the acts of touching and smelling as a mode to cope with melancholia and grief. Lastly, I look at how its hybridization of prose and poetry performatively imitates affective and emotional responses to personal loss.