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The humanities offer a primary means of knowing the body, its ailments, and its habits of healing, living and dying. This premise forms the foundation of the Medical Humanities seminar, and informs its two fundamental goals. First, seminar participants aim to advance knowledge of the body and its frailties across many fields of inquiry -- history, literature, art, theater, anthropology, and religion through a shared interest in the social and cultural significance of medicine, embodiment, sickness, modes of approaching healing, and mortality. Second, the seminar aims to critique the deleterious academic practice of holding scientific and humanist knowledge production distinct. Bifurcation of knowledge about the body and its frailties exacerbates national and global problems in contemporary healthcare practice. We hope to construct new public and scholarly discourses on medicine, health, and mortality and foster the integration of humanistic inquiry at the level of healthcare policy, practice, and individual decision-making.
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Along with my colleague, Monica Black, I co-organize the University of Tennessee Humanities Center's Faculty Research Seminar on the Medical Humanities. Once a month during the semester, we share research and read recent scholarship on medical matters from a variety of disciplines, geographies, media, and chronologies. We are always interested in inviting guests to campus, so please let us know what you are working on by emailing me here: sritchey@utk.edu. You can learn more about the Medical Humanities Faculty Research Seminar here:
https://uthumanitiesctr.utk.edu/research/medical.php
https://uthumanitiesctr.utk.edu/research/medical.php