And the Flesh in Between: Towards a Health Semiotics

Abstract

The call for a biosemiotic perspective within medical semiotics has been steadily increasing over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Johnathan Hope, and the nine contributions in their edited volume boldly seek to bridge the segregation between nature and culture in the medical sciences as well as in the medical humanities. To a large extent, they achieve this aim by explicating the sign relations in food and medicine, the sign relations of medical theory and practice, and the sign relations between the biology in medicine and medicine of society. Taking up a semio-historical approach, I contextualize two select contributions from Hendlin and Hope’s Food and Medicine with the medical semiotics of the Hippocratic tradition. By comparing the biological semiotics from the contributions to the medical semiotics from the Corpus, I critically explicate the ways in which biosemiotics moves this subdiscipline forward and why the perspective is significant not only for the health of humans, but also for the health of other animals, and indeed for the health of the planet that we all inhabit together. On these grounds, I propose a turn from medical semiotics to health semiotics. This program for semiotics would encompass not only food and medicine, but also lifestyle and wellbeing, as well as the subjective, qualitative perspectivism that makes biosemiotics frontier research, thereby constituting a biosemioethics and promoting a semiotic fitness.

A mixed-method study of medical students’ perceptions of social accountability in medical education. Comparing the roles of equity identities, empathies, and curriculum regulation.

“…The silos of knowledge required to learn the multidisciplinary practice of medicine must be bridged [72], to instil a sociological imagination of health production that accounts for 'the fate of our times' [73]. A regulatory shift from medical to health semiotics, applying cybersemiotic theories, can be a values signal or 'semioethic' to graduates' empathies for maligned but deserving patients and colleagues, and the pressing appeal for commitment to actions for sustainable planetary healthcare [74]. The data that support the ndings of this study are available from Dr K.J.…”