German Studies and the Medical/Health Humanities

In December 2023, we organized the annual GSAI conference hosted at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) by Professor Jürgen Barkoff and Professor Mary Cosgrove (TCD) and thematically coordinated by the GSAI Co-Chairs Dr Michaela Schrage- Früh (UL) and Dr Linda Shortt (MU). We selected the theme for our conference – German Studies and the Health/Medical Humanities – to address recent developments in the field. Originally, the term ‘medical humanities’ referred to the integration of the humanities in medical programmes with the aim of forging ‘humanist’, i.e. ethically-minded, health and medical practitioners. Fiction in particular was thought to have the power to elicit empathy and improve doctor-patient relations. This one-directional approach, however, has shifted in recent years as the humanities have increasingly embraced insights from the disciplines of health and medical science and researchers in the humanities have begun to explore cultural representations of mental and physical health, emotion, trauma, illness, disability, care and ageing in genres such as literature, film, life writing and visual and performance art. The importance of exploring the intersections of health and culture has been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has revealed “the determinants of health and structural health inequities”. As Jane McNaughton notes: Medical humanities has tended first and foremost to be associated with the ways in which the arts and humanities help us to understand health. However, this is not the only or necessarily the primary aim of our field. What the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed above all is what the field of critical medical humanities has insisted on: the deep entanglement of social, cultural, historical life with the biomedical.