2.8: Medical Humanities. Medicine in Culture

Medicine does not function solely in the world of biology. It is immersed in language, social norms, values, and perceptions of health, illness, and the human body. The perspective of the medical humanities allows for the investigation of these connections and an understanding of how medicine both shapes and is shaped by culture. It also reveals how medical narratives form social attitudes toward illness, disability, and the norms of health. Crossing the boundaries between different fields of knowledge allows us to perceive what remains invisible within their separate confines. Such a possibility is opened by the medical humanities – bridging reflection on medicine with a humanistic and social perspective.

While medicine concerns the biological functioning of the organism, it remains entangled in meanings, values, cultural norms, cognitive categories, discourses, and practices of action. Humanistic research across various areas of medicine reveals these dependencies and their consequences: from narratives of health and illness, through the customs of clinical practice, to literary representations of bodily experience. Without this perspective, our understanding of how medicine operates would be limited, and our image of culture incomplete.

One of the key areas of research is the question of the relationship between the prevalence of specific disorders and cultural change. Psychiatry remains a particular field of reflection; it is a discipline becoming increasingly “biologized,” yet one that is simultaneously and dynamically expanding the scope of diagnosed experiences. The analysis of media discourses, combined with ethnographic research conducted among patients and doctors, reveals the complexity of the “epidemic” of depression and anxiety in Poland since the systemic transformation. At its root lies not only an increase in factors conducive to illness but also fundamental cultural shifts.

Psychopathographies – literary narratives regarding the experience of mental disorders – have developed with particular intensity in the 21st century, with Italian literature remaining one of the most dynamic areas of this phenomenon. Analyses of these texts reveal characteristic narrative types and metaphors of mental disorders, as well as the presence of significant medical knowledge within literature – knowledge that aligns with the principles of narrative medicine, emphasizing the importance of the patient’s story. They also demonstrate the therapeutic potential of writing and its role in the destigmatization of mental illness.

Another area of research encompasses representations of disability and illness in English-language literature. These analyses show how narrative practices co-shape social attitudes toward bodily and health experiences, and how literary texts both reproduce and critically revise dominant models of somatic, sensory, and intellectual normativity. The research reveals complex relationships between cultural and medical discourses, as well as the impact of medicalization processes on language and literary forms.

↑ The intersection of anatomy and the mind, the physical body and the cultural spirit – this is the sphere of interest for the medical humanities. One of its primary subjects of study is psychiatry (engraving: The diseased brain of an eleven-year-old child, W. T. Fry, 1830, Wikimedia Commons)

↓ FROM THE TOP. 1 Researchers in the humanities and social sciences explore the specific nature of cyborgic forms, which are increasingly reshaping the field of human experience and potential (photo: A. Shvets, pexels.com) 2 Illustration from William Harvey’s 1628 work De Motu Cordis (On the Motion of the Heart). Medical humanities also involves the study of diverse traditions of knowledge and medical practices, as well as their connections to the cultural, political, and economic contexts of various eras (Wikimedia Commons) 3 X-ray interpretation, 1959. New technologies can signify changes in forms of power and social organization – for example, new ways of managing populations and individuals through the lens of health 4 A man in a wheelchair, São Paulo, Brazil (photo: M. Bertelli). Life with a disability can be marked by exclusion resulting not only from architecture or social relations but also from discourse, representation, and emotions. Medical humanities provides an understanding of how these factors operate and offers tools to change them (pexels.com).