Summary:
This monograph is
an important contribution—along with the Health
Humanities Reader (2014)—to the burgeoning field of health humanities, a
new academic field and the presumed replacement for (and expansion of) medical
humanities. While the medical humanities included philosophy, literature, religion,
and history, health humanities includes many more disciplines, and the creative
arts.
This book is
dense with theory and abstraction, but it imaginatively and intelligently
promotes the notion that
health is a larger and more useful concept than
disease, which dominates and limits standard medicine.
Five authors are
listed for the book as a whole; none are attributed specifically to any of the
eight chapters.
The first
chapter “Health Humanities” promotes health humanities as an expansion of
medical humanities to include more people (including unpaid caregivers and patients),
social and national well-being, and the arts, such as dance, music, and visual
art. We need to consider wider ranges of meaning, agency, and patients’ varying
life stories. Unpaid caregivers have been neglected, even though “the majority
of healthcare as it is practiced, is nonmedical” (p. 13). Medicine per se
has been too science-based and too disease oriented, but critical theory and
the arts can be “enabler[s] of health and well-being” (p. 19) with many applications to
hospitals, clinics, homes, and neighborhoods.
“Anthropology
and the Study of Culture” describes a wide range of inquiry, both worldwide and
throughout human time, including rituals, conceptions of disease, health, death,
and impacts for patients. Some cultures believe in spirit possession. The
Chinese have worked with qi (life
energy) for millennia. Cultural studies look at popular media, spiritual perspectives,
also local and subcultural values.
“Applied
Literature” discusses pathographies, including mental illness (for example,
self-harm); it reviews concepts from Rita Charon and describes how reading
groups can promote well-being. Literature expands our understanding of humans
well beyond the biomedical gaze. Closely related,
“Narrative and Applied Linguistics” reviews notions from Osler, Barthes,
Bruner, Propp, Frank, and others. Patients want, beyond technical expertise, healthcare
personnel who will help them co-create an enabling narrative. New techniques in
linguistics include analysis of a corpus of usage, for example, teen language,
thereby gaining approaches to young patients who cut themselves.
At 23 pages, the
longest chapter is “Performing Arts and the Aesthetics of Health.” It posits
that all arts are uniquely human because they are relational, aesthetic, and
temporal (with time in a kairos
sense, not just chronos). The arts
fit into health practices, which also share the same three qualities. The arts
promote coherence, agency, communication, expression, and social wellbeing,
traits that are described specifically in music, dance, and drama.
Similarly, the
next chapter “Visual Art and Transformation,” promotes this particular art,
whether elitist or popular, as communicative and transformative. The making of
art can be healing.
“Practice Based
Evidence: Delivering Humanities into Healthcare” argues against Evidence Based
Practice and its limitations. Instead of Randomized Controlled Trials, smaller,
more qualitative studies may be more accurate and useful. Practice Based
Evidence (and feminist and postmodern approaches) all create wider and deeper
notions of validity.
“Creative Practice
as Mutual Recovery” suggests that caregivers, whether professional or lay, also
find healing as they deliver care.
In “Concluding
Remarks” we read, again, that “the majority of health care and the generation of health and
well-being is non-medical” (p. 153). Medicine and medical humanities are “too narrow a
bandwidth,” but health humanities can support all caregivers, various
institutions (including schools), self-care, and complementary medicine.
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