Medical humanities as expressive of Western culture

Abstract

In this paper we articulate a growing awareness within the field of the ways in which medical humanities could be deemed expressive of Western cultural values. The authors suggest that medical humanities is culturally limited by a pedagogical and scholarly emphasis on Western cultural artefacts, as well as a tendency to enact an uncritical reliance upon foundational concepts (such as 'patient' and 'experience') within Western medicine. Both these tendencies within the field, we suggest, are underpinned by a humanistic emphasis on appreciative or receptive encounters with 'difference' among patients that may unwittingly contribute to the marginalisation of some patients and healthcare workers. While cultural difference should be acknowledged as a central preoccupation of medical humanities, we argue that the discipline must continue to expand its scholarly and critical engagements with processes of Othering in biomedicine. We suggest that such improvements are necessary in order to reflect the cultural diversification of medical humanities students, and the geographical expansion of the discipline within non-Western and/or nonAnglophone locations.It is our contention that, whatever may be the excellent intentions of its founders and practitioners, medical humanities as a field has often been strongly, though not wholly, reflective of the traditions of Western (Anglo-American and European) culture, particularly what used to be referred to as 'high' culture 1 . In this essay we outline the grounds for this perhaps provocative statement, and explore some of its implications for the field. These include the possibility that what constitutes 'the medical humanities' could differ profoundly from place to place, particularly in the developing world. A second concern is that since Western cultural traditions embody certain ideas about selfhood, patienthood, illness and medical care, the dominance of these traditions may exclude important ways of knowing and being for both Western and non-Western patients and doctors.This paper contributes to the recent communal conversations that have, of late, marked the success and expansion of the medical humanities [2][3][4][5] . The field is clearly in the process of significant changechange that is generational, pedagogical, and scholastic. Soul-searching is common to this phase of development. Our own soul-searching was initially prompted by one of us (CH) being privileged to

Reflections on a field across time and space: the emergent medical and health humanities in South Africa

“…There is of course an inherent problem here, inasmuch as MHH is a concept no more separate from European scholarship than biomedicine itself. Indeed, Hooker and Noonan, in this journal, contend that ‘medical humanities as a field has often been strongly, although not wholly, reflective of the traditions of Western (Anglo-American and European) culture, particularly what used to be referred to as “high” culture’ (p. 79) 6. It remains problematic for SA to take up the emblem of MHH, but we must also consider Ngugi, who (as Mbembe sees it) suggests both that the Western intellectual tradition can undo itself , and that it is, to an extent inherently more African than is often understood:…”

“…MHH must be taken on board with the knowledge that, as Hooker and Noonan put it, ‘since Western cultural traditions embody certain ideas about selfhood, patienthood, illness and medical care, the dominance of these traditions may exclude important ways of knowing and being for both Western and non-Western patients and doctors’ (p. 79)6 and cognisant too of the fact that MHH (particularly critical MHH) may to an extent be an attempt at the refutation of its own Western archive.…”

“…Beyond agreeing on the name, however, the network’s ongoing discussions suggest that no member of this loose and widening group has a definitive idea of what MHH might be . The network has thus far shied away from the kind of humanist ‘mission statement’ that Hooker and Noonan identify6 and which might be equated with the ‘service model’ Viney et al 14 seek to move past. MHH conjures up a huge range of ideas in the members of the MHHA (ideas which evolve each time we meet).…”

‘The Medical’ and ‘Health’ in a Critical Medical Humanities

“…Again, there is no shortage of medical humanities work on illness narrative and the subjective experience of illness, but with little critique of the wider political climate within which such work emerges, it is dominated by positivity and praise of heroic survivorship (Bartels 2009;Ehrenreich 2009;King 2006) and by the failure to recognize its own cultural and historical specificity (Hooker and Noonan 2011). The medical humanities have also accorded negligible attention to the art, arguments and activities of activist movements.…”

Lost in translation. Homer in English; the patient's story in medicine

“…Claire Hooker and Estelle Noonan9 point to the medical humanities’ largely unexamined western imperialistic tendencies, an issue that we explore later, in relation to the translator as potential imperialist. We can develop this idea.…”