The Centre for the Humanities and Health, King's College London
Researchers at the Centre for the Humanities and Health are conducting a major cross-disciplinary programme of work, entitled ‘The Boundaries of Illness’, which explores personal and cultural representations of health and illness and the boundaries between them.
The evidence-based nature of science and medicine means that doctors inevitably focus on the biology of illness, diagnosing and treating disease according to specific criteria. This approach is invaluable for getting to grips with pathological processes, developing treatments and cures and alleviating pain. However it cannot, and rarely aims to, illuminate the intrinsically personal nature of illness and suffering - the subjectivity of the experience of ill health. Medical science cannot shed much light on the hugely diverse meanings of illness and health for sufferers and patients from different cultures and historical periods because, as philosopher and physician Raymond Tallis puts it, 'the experience and human significance of illness are not science shaped'.
The Centre for the Humanities and Health aims to draw on a broad spectrum of Humanities disciplines, such as history of art, film studies, literature, philosophy and history, to explore the personal experience of health and disease, and cultural influences on their meanings and representations. The students and staff of the Centre will be working on different aspects of this multifaceted goal.
Key research areas
The Centre is engaging scholars from arts, humanities and health disciplines nationally and internationally to investigate a number of key research strands in the Medical Humanities. The Illness Narrative strand examines the accounts of experiences of illness and health care which have emerged as a literary genre over the past 50 years. Another strand, Medical Portraiture, looks at medical portraits which involve doctors, as sitters, becoming the object of an artist's gaze.The experiences of a sample of 8 000 nurses sent overseas between 1896 and 1966 - based on their letters, memoirs and oral histories - are being studied under the Nursing and Identity strand.
The fine line between mental distress and disorder (with concerns that the latter is being over-diagnosed) is another area of investigation, as are the case notes from the Maudsley Hospital from 1923 to 1938 and the York Clinic at Guy's Hospital from 1944 to 1948. It is hoped that these, covered under the Distress and Disorder and Cultural and historical forces in psychiatric diagnosis strands respectively, will shed light on cultural and historical influences on psychiatric diagnosis during those periods.Alongside these investigations, the Concepts of Health strand will see philosophers at the Centre undertaking a new examination of the philosophical foundations of the concepts of health and disease.
Key achievements
The Centre for the Humanities and Health was officially launched on 21 October 2009 with a keynote lecture from Professor Howard Brody, Director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch - the first institution to configure the Medical Humanities as an academic field in 1973.
The new Centre sits alongside other bodies at King's, including the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics, the Centre for Life writing Research, and the Centre for Health and Society - and should become a productive academic expression of the intellectual exchanges between them. It will also develop links Columbia University's Narrative Medicine masters programme in New York.
The Centre will extend the College's existing capacity in the Medical Humanities at masters, doctoral, post-doctoral and lectureship levels. Staff appointed so far include nine PhD students, to begin in Autumn 2010 and six post doctoral research fellows. King's has also appointed a new lecturer in Literature and Medical Humanities.
In September 2010, the Centre will launch an MSc in Medical Humanities, aiming to explore the foundations of the field and teach students to address questions such as: Does studying the humanities make us more humane? What new angles do the humanities offer on old ethical dilemmas? What is health? What is illness? What kind of evidence about illness does literature provide?
Students who take this course will come away with a strong sense of how a variety of humanities disciplines conceive of health and illness, and of the contributions these can make to healthcare. They will also learn analytical and communication skills that will deepen the doctor-patient relationship.
More information about the MSc Medical Humanities can be found at the links below:
- MSc Medical Humanities on the Centre for the Humanities and Health web pages
- MSc Medical Humanities on the King’s on-line prospectus
In its first year of operation, the Centre has established two successful seminar series, one on the Philosophy of Medicine, convened by Professor MM McCabe, and a research seminar which hosts speakers from a variety of Medical Humanities disciplines. Researchers at the Centre have also contributed numerous articles, reviews and chapters to books and publications and a representative selection are listed below.
Ultimately, the Centre aims to develop into a leading UK research centre in the Medical Humanities that will define and explore this interface area, expand understanding, and help it to coalesce as a field of enquiry.
Key publications
- Bartoszko A and Vaccarella M, The Patient ( eBook), ed. and introduction. Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-904710-83-7
- Bolton D Social, biological and personal constructions of mental illness, in Principles of Social Psychiatry (2e), Bughra D and Morgan C (eds). London: Wiley, 2010 pp. 39-50
- Hurwitz B and Sheikh H Medical fallibility - cultural recognition and representation. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 2009;102:181-185
- Hurwitz B, Sheikh A (eds) Health Care Errors and Patient Safety. Oxford: BMJ Books Wiley-Blackwell 2009
- Jones E, Shell Shock at Maghull and the Maudsley: the origins of psychological medicine, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2010 65(3):368-395; doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrq006
- Rafferty AM and Wall R, Icon or Iconoclast in Sioban Nelson and Anne Marie Rafferty (eds), Notes on Nightingale, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2010
- Vickers N, Thomas Beddoes and the German Psychological Tradition, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 63 (3) 2009, 311-321