On the relation between medicine and medical humanities: Negotiating recognition and influencing practice

Should medical humanities lie in an instrumental relation to medicine, assisting healthcare practitioners to conduct their work in more humane ways? Or should it understand itself as an independent research discipline that can critique medicine without the burden of instrumentality to the aims of medical practice? Medical humanities scholarship has offered a lively debate on this issue, which continues to this day. This article examines a recent contribution to this debate: Critical Medical Humanities. This approach is sceptical of the paradigm of instrumentality, proposing instead to reinvigorate radical strands from the history of medical humanities towards a truly independent transdisciplinary approach. However, Critical Medical Humanities faces a range of epistemological, political, and methodological problems that arise from a lack of sufficient constraint by the point of view of agents engaged in the medical pathway (such as doctors and patients). This renders the Critical Medical Humanities analysis epistemologically incomplete and ethically/politically problematic, the latter since it can constitute misrecognition of the agents’ points of view. Towards a solution, the article offers a methodology, a dialectics of change, that can engage radical medical humanities analysis while negotiating recognition and influencing practice.