Entangling the 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.

Gut thinking: the gut microbiome and mental health beyond the head

“…Further boundaries are also called into question, in terms of what constitutes human and non-human, inside and out, and where the lines of health and illness are placed. These lines do not exist separately in different disciplinary spaces but speak to what Fitzgerald and Callard discuss as the ‘deep entanglements of subjectivity, experience, pathology, incorporation, and so on, which cut across the ways in which we understand both the human and her medicine today’ [26]. The questions raised by these entanglements are as resonant for biomedicine as they are for humanities scholars and suggest the need for both new methods and vocabularies that outmanoeuvre that Cartesian ‘blind spot’ [14].…”

“…The dualist conception of mind over matter does more than to denigrate the body; it also positions the human subject as separate from – and superior to – the natural world. Barad’s work, drawn upon by Fitzgerald and Callard [26], helps to redress this, arguing that ‘being is threaded through with mattering’ and, therefore, the nature of materiality itself ‘is an entanglement’ [54]. The challenge from emerging evidence from the gut microbiome counters the mind over matter assumptions of Cartesian medicine, with bodies re-framed as active and relational and comprised of many different genomes of microorganisms, uprooting psych-orientated, individualist, brain-dominant models of behaviour.…”

“…However, I suggest that it is possible to take a horizontal perspective. This does not mean the eradication of disciplinary boundaries and methodologies but offers an invocation to look differently at the ‘entanglements’ [26] that problematize the vertical linearity from head to body as much as they do the disciplinary silos.…”

“…They argue that a ‘microbial humanities’ is needed to re-think these ‘more than human’ aspects of humanity. This position perhaps risks ignoring the value of existing scholarship that is working to undo nature-culture dualism [26]. However, it does speak to the way in which research on the psychological side of the Cartesian divide has been privileged in medical humanities scholarship on mental health, which has built an emphasis on linguistic and representational issues [72].…”

“…I propose that knowledge about the gut microbiome’s effect on behaviour complicates understandings of mental life and selfhood as contained within the narrating, thinking brain. I build on research into disciplinary entanglements developed in medical humanities scholarship [26] to help contextualise the broad impact of questions around the mind and mental health, calling attention to the way in which research into the microbiome–gut–brain axis illuminates the interplay between biological, psychological and social constructions of mental illness. Finally, I use this critical framework to ask how research into the gut microbiome relates to understandings about selfhood, the way matter is conceptualized, and how embodiment is theorised.…”