Injury Studies: Setting the Agenda for a Critical Medical Humanities Approach to the Control, Perception, Representation, and Experience of Injuries

This article describes a new and expanding field in the health humanities: injury studies. Following a recent international conference sponsored by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the members of the Injury Studies Network have stitched together disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and the creative arts to examine how we live with and make meaning out of injuries. This article explains how this research program extends beyond conventional injury prevention, which tends to define injuries as measurable and theoretically controllable public health outcomes. Drawing on the critical medical humanities, we retheorize injuries as pivotal events for individuals and communities and as powerful lenses for interpreting physical and mental trauma, sociocultural experiences of risk and safety, and the body. Injuries, we contend, are complex events that disrupt the lives of their casualties and fuel broader social and creative processes. These processes extend outward from the moment of injury, reshaping the presents, remembered pasts, and possible futures of injured and uninjured people. This article critically reviews five themes from the literature on injuries and analyzes a series of case studies to lay out this framework for current and future investigators. We also offer a set of cross-cutting research questions on the perception, control, representation, and experience of injuries. Overall, we make the case for injury studies as a site for innovative medical humanities research with the potential to bring together siloed work on injuries, accidents, safety, trauma, risk, recovery, and disability; to enhance graduate and undergraduate education; and to inform interdisciplinary approaches to public health, clinical medicine, and health policy.