Health, Medicine and Wellbeing

Health and wellbeing – physical and mental, human and animal, past and present – preoccupy societies. The expanding discipline of the Medical Humanities challenges the disciplinary boundaries that have framed research into health and medicine, arguing for a genuinely interdisciplinary approach that harnesses the unique resources generated by collaboration across the humanities, social sciences and medical/scientific practice. In particular, it foregrounds the vital role played by the humanities in developing our understanding of how states, communities, and individuals experience, represent, promote, and regulate health, illness, and medical research/practice.

As a research community within the College of Arts and Humanities, we explore the social, cultural, historical, geopolitical, and environmental framings of health and medicine, highlighting the intersection of medical policy/practice with categories such as gender, sexuality, race, religion, and ethnicity. Our group includes postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers and faculty working in the field; together we examine varieties of cultural, historical and literary representations of these matters, encouraging critical engagement with both the opportunities and the challenges of interdisciplinary work.