LibraryGuides: Health Humanities: Books &amp; eBooks

Reference & Encyclopedia Sources

Arts and Health Promotion: Tools and Bridges for Practice, Research, and Social Transformation by Corbin, J. Hope This open access book offers an overview of the beautiful, powerful, and dynamic array of opportunities to promote health through the arts from theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and critical perspectives. This is the first-known text to connect the disparate inter-disciplinary literatures into a coherent volume for health promotion practitioners, researchers, and teachers. It provides a one-stop depository for using the arts as tools for health promotion in many settings and as bridges across communities, cultures, and sectors. The diverse applications of the arts in health promotion transcend the multiple contexts within which health is created, i.e., individual, community, and societal levels, and has a number of potential health, aesthetic, and social outcomes. Topics covered within the chapters include: Exploring the Potential of the Arts to Promote Health and Social Justice Drawing as a Salutogenic Therapy Aid for Grieving Adolescents in Botswana Community Theater for Health Promotion in Japan From Arts to Action: Project SHINE as a Case Study of Engaging Youth in Efforts to Develop Sustainable Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Strategies in Rural Tanzania and India Movimiento Ventana: An Alternative Proposal to Mental Health in Nicaragua Using Art to Bridge Research and Policy: An Initiative of the United States National Academy of Medicine Arts and Health Promotion is an innovative and engaging resource for a broad audience including practitioners, researchers, university instructors, and artists. It is an important text for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses, particularly in program planning, research methods (especially qualitative methodology), community health, and applied art classes. The book also is useful for professional development among current health promotion practitioners, community nurses, community psychologists, public health professionals, and social workers.
ISBN: 9783030564179
Publication Date: 2021
The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities by Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area.
ISBN: 9781474400053
Publication Date: 2022
Handbook of Popular Culture and Biomedicine by Arno Görgen (Editor); German Alfonso Nunez (Editor); Heiner Fangerau (Editor) This handbook explores the ways biomedicine and pop culture interact while simultaneously introducing the reader with the tools and ideas behind this new field of enquiry. From comic books to health professionals, from the arts to genetics, from sci-fi to medical education, from TV series to ethics, it offers different entry points to an exciting and central aspect of contemporary culture: how and what we learn about (and from) scientific knowledge and its representation in pop culture. Divided into three sections the handbook surveys the basics, the micro-, and the macroaspects of this interaction between specialized knowledge and cultural production: After the introduction of basic concepts of and approaches to the topic from a variety of disciplines, the respective theories and methods are applied in specific case studies. The final section is concerned with larger social and historical trends of the use of biomedical knowledge in popular culture. Presenting over twenty-five original articles from international scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds, this handbook introduces the topic of pop culture and biomedicine to both new and mature researchers alike. The articles, all complete with a rich source of further references, are aimed at being a sincere entry point to researchers and academic educators interested in this somewhat unexplored field of culture and biomedicine.
ISBN: 9783319906768
Publication Date: 2018-09-20
Health Humanities in Application by Christian Riegel (Editor); Katherine M. Robinson (Editor) This book focuses on health humanities in application. The field reflects many intellectual interests and practical applications, serving researchers, educators, students, health care practitioners, and community members wherever health and wellness and the humanities intersect. How we implement health humanities forms the core approach, and perspectives are global, including North America, Africa, Europe, and India. Emphasizing key developments in health humanities, the book's chapters examine applications, including reproductive health policy and arts‑based research methods, black feminist approaches to health humanities pedagogy, artistic expressions of lived experience of the coronavirus, narratives of repair and re‑articulation and creativity, cultural competency in physician‑patient communication through dance, embodied dance practice as knowing and healing, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, eye tracking, ableism and disability, rethinking expertise in disability justice, disability and the Global South, coronavirus and Indian politics, visual storytelling in graphic medicine, and medical progress and racism in graphic fiction.
ISBN: 9783031083594
Publication Date: 2023-02-23
Health Humanities Reader by Therese Jones (Editor); Delese Wear (Editor) Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice. In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field--and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection's contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences.  With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, Health Humanities Reader truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness.
ISBN: 0813562481
Publication Date: 2014-08-28
Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness by Rita Charon Narrative medicine has emerged in response to a commodified health care system that places corporate and bureaucratic concerns over the needs of the patient. Generated from a confluence of sources including humanities and medicine, primary care medicine, narratology, and the study of doctor-patient relationships, narrative medicine is medicine practiced with the competence to recognize, absorb, interpret and be moved by the stories of illness. By placing events in temporal order, with beginnings, middles and ends, and by establishing connections among things using metaphor and figural language, narrative medicine helps doctors to recognize patients and diseases, convey knowledge, accompany patients through the ordeals of illness - and according to Rita Charon, can ultimately lead to more humane, ethical and effective healthcare. Trained in medicine and in literary studies, Rita Charon is a pioneer of and authority on the emerging field of narrative medicine.; In this important and long-awaited book she provides a comprehensive and systemic introduction to the conceptual principles underlying narrative medicine, as well as a practical guide for implementing narrative methods in health care. A true milestone in the field, it will interest general readers and experts in medicine, humanities and literary theory.
ISBN: 1280840773
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities by Paul Crawford (Editor); Brian Brown (Editor); Andrea Charise (Editor) The health humanities is a rapidly rising field, advancing an inclusive, democratizing, activist, applied, critical, and culturally diverse approach to delivering health and well-being through the arts and humanities. It has generated new kinds of interdisciplinary research, knowledge, and communities of practice globally. It has also acted to bring greater coherence and political force to contributions across a range of related disciplines and traditions. In this volume, a formidable set of authors explore the history, current state, and future of the health humanities, in particular how its vision of the arts and humanities: Promotes creative public health. Opens new routes to health and well-being. Informs and drives better health care. Interrogates relationships between ill health and social equality. Develops humanist theory in relation to health and social care practice. Foregrounds cultural difference as a resource for positive change in society. Tests the humanity of an increasingly globalized health-care system. Looks to overcome structural and process obstacles to cross-disciplinary ventures. Champions co-construction, co-design, and mutuality in solving health and well-being challenges. Showcases less familiar, prominent, or celebrated creative practices. Includes multiple perspectives on the value and health benefits of the arts and humanities not limited to or dominated by medicine. Divided into two main sections, the Companion looks at "Reflections and Critical Perspectives," offering current thinking and definitions within health humanities, and "Applications," comprising a wide selection of applied arts and humanities practices from comedy, writing, and dancing to yoga, cooking, and horticultural display.
ISBN: 1138579904
Publication Date: 2020-02-21
Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities by Bleakley Alan (Editor) This authoritative new handbook offers a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the state of the medical humanities globally, showing how clinically oriented medical humanities, the critical study of medicine as a global historical and cultural phenomenon, and medicine as a force for cultural change can inform each other. Composed of eight parts, the Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities looks at the medical humanities as: a network and system therapeutic provocation forms of resistance a way of reconceptualising the medical curriculum concerned with performance and narrative mediated by artists as diagnosticians of culture through public engagement. This book describes how the medical humanities can be used in and out of clinical settings, acting as a point of resistance, redistributing medicine's capital amongst its stakeholders, embracing the complexity of medical instances, shaping medical education, promoting interdisciplinary understandings and recognising an identity for the medical humanities as a network effect. This book is an essential read for all students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in the medical humanities.
ISBN: 9780815374619
Publication Date: 2019-08-23

Core Titles

The following titles are popular among health humanities curricula, book clubs, and other community programming. They represent just a slice of available literature and topics within this interdisciplinary field.

Black Man in a White Coat by Damon Tweedy A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*ONE OFTIME MAGAZINE'S TOP TEN NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR ALIBRARY JOURNALBEST BOOK SELECTION*A BOOKLIST EDITORS' CHOICE BOOK SELECTION One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans When Damon Tweedy begins medical school, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites." Black Man in a White Coatexamines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosedwith a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.
ISBN: 9781250105042
Publication Date: 2016-09-06
Compassionomics: : the revolutionary scientific evidence that caring makes a difference by Anthony Mazzarelli; Stephen Trzeciak Compelling new research shows that health care is in the midst of a compassion crisis. But the pivotal question is Does compassion really matter? In The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference, physician scientists Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli uncover the eye-opening data that compassion could be a wonder drug for the 21st century. Now, for the first time ever, a rigorous review of the science - coupled with captivating stories from the front lines of medicine - demonstrates that human connection in health care matters in astonishing ways. Never before has all the evidence been synthesized together in one place.
ISBN: 9781622181063
Publication Date: 2019-01-01
Gratitude by Oliver Sacks No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. "It is the fate of every human being," Sacks writes, "to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death." Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life.
ISBN: 9780451492937
Publication Date: 2015-11-24
Our Malady : Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary by Timothy Snyder From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny comes an impassioned condemnation of America's pandemic response and an urgent call to rethink health and freedom.On December 29, 2019, historian Timothy Snyder fell gravely ill. Unable to stand, barely able to think, he waited for hours in an emergency room before being correctly diagnosed and rushed into surgery. Over the next few days, as he clung to life and the first light of a new year came through his window, he found himself reflecting on the fragility of health, not recognized in America as a human right but without which all rights and freedoms have no meaning.And that was before the pandemic. We have since watched American hospitals, long understaffed and undersupplied, buckling under waves of ill patients. The federal government made matters worse through willful ignorance, misinformation, and profiteering. Our system of commercial medicine failed the ultimate test, and thousands of Americans died.In this eye-opening cri de coeur, Snyder traces the societal forces that led us here and outlines the lessons we must learn to survive. In examining some of the darkest moments of recent history and of his own life, Snyder finds glimmers of hope and principles that could lead us out of our current malaise. Only by enshrining healthcare as a human right, elevating the authority of doctors and medical knowledge, and planning for our children's future can we create an America where everyone is truly free.
ISBN: 0593238907
Publication Date: 2020
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi; Abraham Verghese (Foreword by) This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * People * NPR * The Washington Post * Slate * Harper's Bazaar * Time Out New York * Publishers Weekly * BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he wrote. "Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'" When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
ISBN: 9780812988406
Publication Date: 2016-01-12

Books

Similar to the selection of "Core Titles" above, the following are all new titles from the past 5 years that represent other perspectives and impact within this interdisciplinary field.

American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics by Kevin Hazzard The extraordinary story of an unjustly forgotten group of Black men in Pittsburgh who became the first paramedics in America, saving lives and changing the course of emergency medicine around the world   Until the 1970s, if you suffered a medical crisis, your chances of survival were minimal. A 9-1-1 call might bring police or even the local funeral home. But that all changed with Freedom House EMS in Pittsburgh, a group of Black men who became America's first paramedics and set the gold standard for emergency medicine around the world, only to have their story and their legacy erased--until now. In American Sirens, acclaimed journalist and paramedic Kevin Hazzard tells the dramatic story of how a group of young, undereducated Black men forged a new frontier of healthcare. He follows a rich cast of characters that includes John Moon, an orphan who found his calling as a paramedic; Peter Safar, the Nobel Prize-nominated physician who invented CPR and realized his vision for a trained ambulance service; and Nancy Caroline, the idealistic young doctor who turned a scrappy team into an international leader. At every turn, Freedom House battled racism--from the community, the police, and the government. Their job was grueling, the rules made up as they went along, their mandate nearly impossible--and yet despite the long odds and fierce opposition, they succeeded spectacularly. Never-before revealed in full, this is a rich and troubling hidden history of the Black origins of America's paramedics, a special band of dedicated essential workers, who stand ready to serve day and night on the line between life and death for every one of us. 
ISBN: 9780306926075
Publication Date: 2022-09-20
Colonial Caring : a history of colonial and post-colonial nursing by Christine Hallett (Series edited by); Helen Sweet (Editor); Sue Hawkins (Editor); Jane Schultz (Series edited by) From the height of colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, through to the aftermath of the Second World War, nurses have been at the heart of colonial projects. They were ideally placed to insinuate the 'improving' culture of their employers into the local communities they served, and travelled in droves to far-flung parts of the globe to serve their country. Issues of gender, class and race permeate this book, as the complex relationships between nurses, their medical colleagues, governments and the populations they nursed are examined in detail, using case studies which draw on exciting new sources. Many of the chapters are based on first-hand accounts of nurses and reveal that not all were motivated by patriotic vigour or altruism, but went out in search of adventure. The book will be an essential read for colonial historians, as well as historians of gender and ethnicity.
ISBN: 1526129361
Publication Date: 2018-02-21
Others of my kind : transatlantic transgender histories by Alex Bakker; Rainer Herrn; Michael Thomas Taylor; Annette F. Timm An illuminating look at the transatlantic, transgender community that shaped the history and study of sexuality. From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1950s, a group of transgender people on both sides of the Atlantic created communities that profoundly shaped the history and study of sexuality. By exchanging letters and pictures among themselves they established private networks of affirmation and trust, and by submitting their stories and photographs to medical journals and popular magazines they sought to educate both doctors and the public. Others of My Kind draws on archives in Europe and North America to tell the story of this remarkable transatlantic transgender community. This book uncovers threads of connection between Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands to discover the people who influenced the work of authorities like Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Benjamin, and Alfred Kinsey not only with their clinical presentations, but also with their personal relationships. With more than 170 colour and black and white illustrations, including many stunning, previously unpublished photographs, Others of My Kind celebrates the faces, lives, and personal networks of those who drove twentieth-century transgender history.
ISBN: 1773851233
Publication Date: 2020
The People's Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine by Ricardo Nuila "Nuila's storytelling gifts place him alongside colleagues like Atul Gawande." --Los Angeles Times This "compelling mixture of health care policy and gripping stories from the frontlines of medicine" (The Guardian) explores the question: where does an uninsured person go when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? Here, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital that prioritizes people over profit. First, we meet Stephen, the restaurant franchise manager who signed up for his company's lowest priced plan, only to find himself facing insurmountable costs after a cancer diagnosis. Then Christian--a young college student and retail worker who can't seem to get an accurate diagnosis, let alone treatment, for his debilitating knee pain. Geronimo, thirty-six years old, has liver failure, but his meager disability check disqualifies him for Medicaid--and puts a life-saving transplant just out of reach. Roxana, who's lived in the community without a visa for more than two decades, suffers from complications related to her cancer treatment. And finally, there's Ebonie, a young mother whose high-risk pregnancy endangers her life. Whether due to immigration status, income, or the vagaries of state Medicaid law, all five are denied access to care. For all five, this exclusion could prove life-threatening. Each patient eventually lands at Ben Taub, the county hospital where Dr. Nuila has worked for over a decade. Nuila delves with empathy into the experiences of his patients, braiding their dramas into a singular narrative that contradicts the established idea that the only way to receive good health care is with good insurance. As readers follow the moving twists and turns in each patient's story, it's impossible to deny that our system is broken--and that Ben Taub's innovative model, where patient care is more important than insurance payments, could help light the path forward.
ISBN: 9781501198069
Publication Date: 2023
Twice As Hard : The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century by Brown, Jasmine No real account of black women physicians in the US exists, and what little mention is made of these women in existing histories is often insubstantial or altogether incorrect. In this work of extensive research, Jasmine Brown offers a rich new perspective, penning the long-erased stories of nine pioneering black women physicians beginning in 1860, when a black woman first entered medical school. Brown champions these black women physicians, including the stories of: · Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, who graduated from medical school only fourteen months after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and provided medical care for the newly freed slaves who had been neglected and exploited by the medical system. · Dr. Edith Irby Jones, the first African American to attend a previously white-only medical school in the Jim Crow South, where she was not allowed to eat lunch with her classmates or use the women's bathroom. Still, Dr. Irby Jones persisted and graduated from medical school, going on to directly inspire other black women to pursue medicine such as . . . · Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who, after meeting Dr. Irby Jones, changed her career ambitions from becoming a Dillard's salesclerk to becoming a doctor. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Elders as the US surgeon general, making her the first African American and second woman to hold this position. Brown tells the stories of these doctors from the perspective of a black woman in medicine. Her journey as a medical student already has parallels to those of black women who entered medicine generations before her. What she uncovers about these women's struggles, their need to work twice as hard and be twice as good, and their ultimate success serves as instruction and inspiration for new generations considering a career in medicine or science.
ISBN: 0807025097
Publication Date: 2023