{"id":832,"date":"2017-05-24T08:11:10","date_gmt":"2017-05-24T07:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=832"},"modified":"2018-01-10T02:17:10","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T02:17:10","slug":"confessions-of-a-medical-humanist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2017\/05\/24\/confessions-of-a-medical-humanist\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a Medical Humanist"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Neil Vickers<\/a>, Reader in English Literature and Medical Humanities, Department of English<\/em><\/p>\n

When I first came to King\u2019s more than 10 years ago now, I was dubious about \u2018the medical humanities<\/a>\u2019. I knew what the medical humanities were, or at least I thought I did. It was a name that could be applied to any attempt to make sense of matters in which medicine has a say, using ideas or frames of reference derived from humanities disciplines. But I would never have described myself as a medical humanist. My work \u2013 which until then had largely been rooted in the historical study of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature \u2013 belonged in \u2018English\u2019. \u2018English\u2019 had an intellectual and institutional history I could admire (if only I had the talents of William Empson<\/a> or Helen Vendler<\/a>!), unlike the medical humanities, which seemed by comparison so diverse, so underdeveloped, and so wannabe.<\/p>\n

Would medicine ever take the medical humanities seriously, beyond paying lip service to platitudes about \u2018treating the whole person\u2019?…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The taint of amateurism was never far away. Would medicine ever take the medical humanities seriously, beyond paying lip service to platitudes about \u2018treating the whole person\u2019? Would English, if it weren\u2019t for all that Wellcome money? Back then I thought the answer to both those questions was \u2018No\u2019. I still have reservations about the medical humanities, but they\u2019re very different from the ones I had back then. And my attitude to \u2018English\u2019 has changed, as English itself has. But now I cheerfully describe myself as first and foremost a medical humanist, or a health humanist.<\/p>\n

So what happened? Two things stand out.<\/p>\n

\"neil\"<\/a>
What did Coleridge know about medicine and how did it influence the development of his critical thought? Neil Vickers addresses this question in his monograph, published in 2004<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

First, I began teaching on a new Master’s in Literature and Medicine<\/a>. I devised two very old-fashioned modules on \u2018The Doctor in Literature\u2019 and \u2018Literature and Psychiatry in the Twentieth Century\u2019. I still needed to feel that I was in \u2018English\u2019, you see, and was determined to defend myself against what I feared would be a very instrumental view of literature. I hadn\u2019t allowed for the effect of the students on my outlook, especially those with clinical backgrounds. The Master’s course attracted many clinicians who had been thinking hard about literature in their spare time \u2013 for decades in some cases. I learned lots of specific things from them about particular works of literature but I also learned one very important general thing, namely, that it was possible to love literature and allow it a degree of authority in a jobbing clinical life that I hadn\u2019t allowed myself to see. It sounds very simple but it\u2019s not. I may come back to this topic in a future post.<\/p>\n

…it was possible to love literature and allow it a degree of authority in a jobbing clinical life that I hadn\u2019t allowed myself to see.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Second, thanks to a Strategic Award from the Wellcome Trust<\/a>, I began a new research project on illness narrative, focusing on contemporary memoirs dealing with illness. It had always seemed to me that the medical humanities had treated illness as an exceptional state of affairs and the ill as human exceptions. What I learned from my immersion in memoirs is that nothing sheds light on the nature of human relatedness like illness. When we become ill, our footing in the world is substantially weakened. Inter-subjectivity has to be fought for. At the same time, the need for inter-subjectivity is greater than ever. Expressions of pain and distress are fundamentally calls for assistance and help. This has been recognised in diverse literatures, for example in philosophical work on subjectivity and pain, and in Robert Spitze<\/a>r\u2019s original conceptual work on illness for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders <\/a>(better known as the DSM). What memoirs of illness seemed to contain was an account of why the whole person matters. They were talking about a dynamic system of interacting processes, past and present, for which there is no name.<\/p>\n

What I learned from my immersion in memoirs is that nothing sheds light on the nature of human relatedness like illness…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I now think of the isolation and social suffering of people with major illness as the most important neglected topic I know. It has become my central preoccupation. Derek Bolton<\/a> and I are writing a book called Shared Life and the Experience of Illness,\u00a0<\/em>which describes the problem from the standpoint of phenomenology<\/a>, infant research, ethnomethodology<\/a>, neuroscience, social psychology, psychoanalysis, and of course, illness memoir<\/a>. Operating so far outside the remit of \u2018English\u2019, how else could I describe myself than as a medical or health humanist?<\/p>\n

One advantage of not thinking of myself as a medical humanist was I didn\u2019t have to give much thought to the question of what they might be able to achieve. I\u2019m still in two minds about whether or not they have a future. Few will agree with me, I suspect, but it may come down to how far humanists are willing to engage with the science surrounding medicine. Here I am referring especially to the disciplines that are transforming our understanding of lived experience and its consequences: epigenetics<\/a>, epidemiology<\/a>, neuroscience, biology. But that\u2019s definitely a matter for a future post.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________________________________<\/span><\/p>\n

Featured image: Peaceful Heart Doctor by Banksy.\u00a9 Eva Blue\u00a0https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/evablue\/4583830419<\/p>\n

You may also be interested in Book Review: Thinking in Cases<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Blog posts on King’s English represent the views of the individual authors and not those of the English Department, nor King’s College London. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Neil Vickers, Reader in English Literature and Medical Humanities, Department of English When I first came to King\u2019s more than 10 years ago now, I was dubious about \u2018the medical humanities\u2019. I knew what the medical humanities were, or at least I thought I did. It was a name that could be applied to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":685,"featured_media":834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,25,23],"tags":[254,243,253,240,244,241,252,242],"class_list":["post-832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-20th-21st-centuries","category-life-writing-creative-writing-and-performance","category-literature-medicine-and-science","tag-health-humanities","tag-illness-narrative","tag-med-hums","tag-medical-humanities","tag-memoir","tag-robert-spitzer","tag-science","tag-wellcome-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":893,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions\/893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}