Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Bolton, G.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Boundaries of Humanities: Writing Medical Humanities

Gillie Bolton

gillie{at}gilliebolton.com

Literature and medicine is a discipline within medical humanities, which challenges medicine to reconfigure its scientific model to become interdisciplinary, and be disciplined by arts and humanities as well as science. The psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical are inextricably linked in people, inevitably entailing provisionality, disturbance and lack of certainty, and lack of closure and therefore of control. Arts and humanities approaches can foster significant interpretive enquiry into illness, disability, suffering, and care. Reflective expressive writing, undertaken and engaged with critically, and particularly when explorative of narrative and metaphor, can enable professionally developmental enquiry into values, ethics, identity and responsibilities. This article offers examples of reflexivity, reflection, and disciplined questioning of the narrative and perspectival nature of medical and healthcare clinicians' experience. Creative writing is a focus, as art can observe and connect from unconventional angles.

Key Words: literature and medicine • medical humanities • metaphor • narrative • reflective writing • uncertainty

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Vol. 7, No. 2, 131-148 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1474022208088643
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?