Short description:

This volume addresses the notions of violence, care and cure within the medical encounter, exploring their ambiguity and complex entanglement by way of analyses of different medical scenes, objects and concepts.

Long description:

This volume addresses the notions of violence, care and cure within the medical encounter and seeks to foreground their ambiguity, whether individually or as a triad. Thematically organised, it attends to the complex entanglement of these key terms by way of historical, practical, philosophical, personal, and aesthetic analyses of different medical scenes, objects and concepts. Arguing that a hermeneutic of violence, care, and cure is inseparable from individual and collective perceptions of the medical encounter, it considers both the material and 'immaterial' spaces in which medical encounters occur (whether the consulting room or the biopolitical discourse, for instance), engaging with the most apparent forms of medical violence as well as with hidden forms of aggression that circulate in everyday medical and healthcare settings, and which affect predominantly marginalised and minority groups. It will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in the medical humanities, critical theory and gender studies.

?This thought-provoking and rich edited volume explores the concepts of violence, care and cure as part of the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on the medical encounter. Contributions by leading and emerging scholars from an impressive range of disciplines engage the reader in historical, practical, philosophical and creative reflections that open up new dimensions of research across the fields of medicine and humanities. An eye-opening read for scholars and professionals interested in new and self-reflective approaches to the study and practice of medicine through the humanities and vice versa.?

Heike Bartel, Professor of German Studies and Health Humanities, The University of Nottingham, UK

"In healthcare and medicine, efforts to care and cure are entangled with violence in complex ways. The contributions in this book highlight the potential of medical humanities to uncover systemic biases and broaden our understanding of medical encounters. The volume is an essential contribution to scholarship, opening new avenues for research and reflection."

Anna Ovaska, Research Fellow in Narrative Studies, Tampere University, Finland

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: Violence, Care, Cure: (Self-)Perceptions Within the Medical Encounter Musing 1: Narrative Medicine, Racial Justice and The Black Maternal Mortality Crisis Part 1: Medical Histories and Biopolitics 2. Touching Matters of Care: A Visual Approach to Care and Violence in Dr Marie Stopes? Birth Control Campaign 3. Politics In the Time of Cholera: COVID, Table Manners, and Bio-Politics 4. Bio-Story: Michel Foucault and The History of Social Medicine Musing 2: Counteracting Psychiatric Violence Through Critical Heritage Studies and Cooperation Part 2: Unsettling and Working Through Practices and Languages of Cure 5. The ?Interpretation Workshop? As Artistic Research: A Methodological Approach to Original Biographical National Socialist Writings 6. ?The Way Out Is Via the Door?: R.D. Laing and the Cure from The Family 7. ?Io Sono Matta?: Psychiatric Violence, Militant Madness, and Sexual Difference in Alberto Grifi?s ?Anthropology of Disobedience? 8. The Denied Poetics of Global Psychiatry and Frantz Fanon?s Poetisation of Science Musing 3: Fanon, Epistemic Injustice, and the Colonial Medical Encounter Part 3: Agency in Illness and Ethics of Suffering 9. Narrative Autonomy to The Test of Illness 10. Plumbing The Perpetual Loss of Paradise: Susan Taubes and Sacred Suffering 11. Almodóvar?s Anatomies Musing 4: On Care and Violence in Medical Humanities Research Collaborations Part 4: Anatomy of a Transformation 12. T For Trans: An Outraged Investigation of Non-Binary Medical Transition in Germany 13. I Am Not My MRI 14. Surprised By the Night: On the Traversal of a Dysphoric Phantasy 15. Afterword: Moral Value in Medicine: Violence, Cure, and Care