Chapter 1. Entangling the medical humanities : IN Book: The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities

Abstract

The medical humanities are at a critical juncture. On the one hand, practitioners of this field can bask in their recent successes: in the UK, at least, what was once a loose set of intuitions – broadly about animating the clinical and research spaces of biomedicine with concepts and methods from the humanities – has become a visible and coherent set of interventions, with its own journals, conferences, centres, funding streams and students. On the other hand, the growth, coherence and stratification of this heterogeneous domain have raised the spectre of just what, exactly, the medical humanities is growing into. In particular, scholars have begun to worry that the success of the medical humanities is tied up with being useful to biomedicine, that the medical humanities has been able to establish itself only by appearing as the domain of pleasant (but more or less inconsequential) helpmeets.