Introduction: Gender and (Auto)pathography from a Transnational Perspective

‘Medical Humanities’ (MH), the critical enclave of this cluster, is an interdisciplinary area of knowledge which examines human health and illness using the tools and insights of creative arts and humanities. MH endeavors to comprehend the diverse spectrum of physical and mental ailments by drawing from literature and various forms of artistic expression. The boom of MH both in the United States and Europe is manifested by the increase of this field of studies in undergraduate and graduate programs, professional training opportunities, career paths, conferences, and articles in prestigious academic journals, such as Medical Humanities, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, or Arts and Health, among others. By consulting Scopus (http://www.scopus.com), the preeminent abstract and citation database for peer-reviewed research literature and conducting a search for 'Medical Humanities' spanning from 1970 to 2023, the findings in the 'Documents by Year' section (totaling 21,461 entries) reveal a consistent and steady upward trajectory. Commencing with a solitary document in 1971, the inaugural year recorded, the count surged to 54 in 1980, escalated to 498 in 2010, and surged to 1,581 in 2020, culminating in 2,417 entries by 2023. Furthermore, upon delving into the 'Documents by Subject Area', the analysis indicates that a significant majority of scholarly articles concerning MH originate from authors entrenched in the Health Sciences field (including Medicine, Nursing, Psychology, Neuroscience, Health professionals, Genetics), while only 15.9 percent stem from scholars within the Arts and Humanities domain. Hence, the authors of these articles, all affiliated with a research group located in Spain, envisioned the importance of enriching this field through their humanistic perspective, stemming from their roles as university professors and literature researchers.