What can art history offer medical humanities?

Biernoff, Suzannah and Johnstone, F. (2024) What can art history offer medical humanities? Medical Humanities , ISSN 1473-4265.

Abstract

This article charts the emergence of visual medical humanities as a space of academic research, creative practice, and lively critical debate, with a focus on how art historical scholarship has influenced the field’s formation. Concentrating on developments over the past decade, it offers an overview of current scholarship while highlighting opportunities and challenges for the future. We begin with a survey of medical and health humanities handbooks and readers, noting that their engagement with art and visual culture is predominately limited to the contexts of therapy, clinical pedagogy, and medical history. The main part of the article explores art historical scholarship in relation to three areas of significance for the medical humanities. First, we address art historical research that engages with medical history, identifying major topoi including the anatomical body, the doctor-patient encounter, and the close relationship between clinical and artistic vision; we argue that this work has tended to presume, rather than explicitly articulate, its relationship to medical humanities, and recommend that art historians wishing to engage more deeply with the medical humanities need to clearly communicate what their work brings to wider debates in the field. Second, we explore contemporary arts practices that mobilise health-related experiences, forms of care, and practical activism: medical humanities, we argue, has much to gain from a critical engagement with contemporary (as well as historical) art. Third, we review three art-history led projects that are re-defining the field and promoting new models for collaborative “entanglement” across disciplines: Art HX: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism; Visualizing the Virus; and Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities. By arguing for the vital importance of attending to the critical complexities of art and visual culture, this article aims to enrich existing debates and provoke a new wave of visually-engaged medical humanities scholarship.

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