As Barthman and Baruch note in the
Keywords volume, creativity is “fundamental to the practice of caring for others.” In this spirit, the
Oak Institute For Human Rights Student Committee, comprised of both STEM and humanities students, held a workshop at the Greene Block + Studios, a collaborative arts center in downtown Waterville, Maine. This environment granted premed students, who are typically focused on fulfilling technical requirements, the freedom to explore the creative side of the medical humanities. Collectively making personalized tote bags printed with the conference’s keywords gave participants a tangible space to reflect on how medical treatment has impacted their lives and how to apply these insights to their own ethics of patient care.
Elizabeth Jabar, Lawry Family Dean of Civic Engagement and Partnerships, helps students screen print tote bags at the Greene Block + Studios
[Image credit: Tanya Sheehan]
Elizabeth Jabar, Lawry Family Dean of Civic Engagement and Partnerships, helps students screen print tote bags at the Greene Block + Studios
[Image credit: Tanya Sheehan]Coercive Care
In her course “Drug Wars in the Americas,”
Winifred Tate unpacked entangled ideas of coercive care for people who use drugs enacted in the county jail system. As part of her work with the
Maine Drug Policy Lab, she shared fieldwork interviews with law enforcement, health care providers, and women incarcerated in the Aroostook County jail in Houlton and the Kennebec jail in Augusta, along with testimony and public statements about drug policy in public hearings at the Maine State Legislature. Tate revealed in her presentation how drug use is simultaneously encoded in language as a medical disease (substance use disorder) and as a crime, a choice, a moral failing, and a future risk. Jail is a place where these distinct understandings converge through the contradictory imaginings of jail as a place of care and punishment, and care as punishment. In this view, incarceration is a ‘safe’ space, where the incarcerated can gain access to health care and be forced to receive certain forms of medical treatments, and as a social safety net for a society unwilling to provide services in other forms. At the same time, incarceration is punishment, designed to impose deserved suffering on criminals, as ‘tough love’ for people who must reach ‘rock bottom’ and as a form of accountability.
Narrative
Expanding her research on the
Russian Medical Humanities,
Melissa L. Miller discussed how comics artists in post-Soviet space use the Anglophone concept of narrative medicine–a term that does not yet exist in Russian– to advocate for better care practices in the post-USSR health landscape. By illustrating narratives of their illness, these artists use the conventions of comic illustration to critique how chronic conditions are typically portrayed. Seeking treatment from the medical establishment has trained these artists to cope with illness by dividing themselves into discrete parts, in order to deal with the pain and shame that comes from not being able to control their own bodies. Narrative medicine reveals the damage caused by this internalized subdivision, as well as offers opportunities to put one’s self together again via art and language.
Withheld Care
In the context of his introduction to medical ethics course,
Jay Sibara delivered a presentation that began by considering Ralph Ellison's literary representation of the protagonist's survival of biomedical violence in the novel Invisible Man (1952), which supports recent revisions by critical race feminist bioethics scholars of the dominant historiography of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Ellison illuminates the un(der)recognized role of Black women healers and family members in providing life- and health-sustaining care to Black men subjected to abusive biomedical experimentation. The presentation concluded with comparisons between the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and another longitudinal biomedical study that also controversially withheld medical treatment from research subjects: the US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission's study of the health effects of radiation on survivors of the US atomic bombings in Japan (1947-1975).
Keyword Futures
On the final day of the conference, a public conversation between Sari Altschuler and
Nadia El-Shaarawi highlighted the event’s groundbreaking work in bringing research and teaching in the medical humanities to a small liberal arts college. The cross-disciplinary nature of the conference’s keyword interventions, such as combining literary studies with biomedical research and employing artistic media to visualize disease, can serve as a model for students at other colleges to learn at the intersection of medicine and the humanities. As conference co-organizer Tanya Sheehan put it, “We hope that our event will inspire other colleges to define the medical and health humanities through the big ideas emerging from the research of their own faculty and students.” Sheehan and her colleagues in Colby’s PHIL welcome opportunities to collaborate with scholars and institutions seeking to develop their own engagement with this exciting and evolving field.
Author Bio
Melissa L. Miller is Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at Colby College. She specializes in the medical humanities and Russophone literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, with a special focus on depictions of women’s health. She is co-editor of
The Russian Medical Humanities: Past and Present (2021), which brings together Russian and American scholars and health practitioners to explore questions surrounding health and healthcare, illness, and recovery in the Russian literary and cultural tradition. Her current book project examines narrative medicine and women’s health in the literature and culture of the multiethnic Russian Empire.
Editor's Comment
Ashton Wesner edited this post with assistance from
Aaron Gregory. 
