Postdigital health practices: new directions in medical humanities

Abstract

Digitalisation has changed the way we understand and practice health. The recent pandemic has accelerated some of the developments in digital health and brought about modifications in public access to information. Taking this into consideration, this programmatic paper sets the stage for and conceptualises postdigital health practices as a possible field of inquiry within medical humanities. While delineating some central aspects of said practices, I draw attention to their significance in contemporary strategies of knowledge production. Spotlighting online environments as the point of ingress for the analysis of these practices, I propose three possible foci of critical and methodological engagement. By spotlighting the serialisation, multimodality, and transmediality of such environments, I argue, we have a chance to both augment and go beyond the field’s long-standing preoccupation with narrative, attend to various strategies of communicating illness experience, and re-frame them within larger questions of systemic inequalities. On this basis, and taking as examples COVID-19 and Long COVID, I sketch some of the directions that future strands of medical humanities may take and some of the questions we still have to ask for the field to overcome its own biases and blind spots.