Exploring the Interdisciplinary Connections: The Role of Medical Humanities in Understanding Illness and Healing

Medical Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that explores the human aspects of medicine through literature, art, ethics, history, and philosophy. It is indeed emerging interdisciplinary field that bridges literature, medicine, and ethics, focusing on human experiences of illness, suffering, healing, and care. The contemporary Indian English novels have increasingly engaged with medical humanities, addressing health crises, body politics, mental health, pandemics, and medical ethics. The present paper explores how Indian English novelists use literature to decode emotional, social, and cultural dimensions of medicines. It also examines how contemporary Indian English novelists like Arundhati Roy, Manjula Padmanabhan, Anita Nair, and Amitav Ghosh employ literary strategies to humanize medicine, critique healthcare systems, and present illness as a lived social reality.