Rethinking Body in Medical Humanities (Editors' Note)

The origin of medical humanities can be traced back to the post-World War II debates on bioethics, with the term being coined by George Sarton in 1948. Yet it would perhaps be misleading to anchor this new field of inquiry in a particular monolithic cultural moment. The emergence of medical humanities is a multi-factorial phenomenon which bridges the clinical divide between medical science and arts/humanities, and thinks through curriculum reforms in medical education, pharmaceutical and technological advances, etc. This field promotes a critical dialogue between biomedical science—particularly the theoretical and practical issues in the domain of medicine, clinical practices, and medical ethics—and humanities as well as social sciences. In the recent decades, medical humanities has grown into an exciting area of interdisciplinary inquiry, allowing an interrogation into a range of concerns around human illness and wellness. In doing so, it deals with pertinent questions about bodily experience of disease, patient-practitioner relationship, health policies and infrastructure, narrative ethics, palliative care, suffering, illness narrative, gerontology, and medical technology.