Humanists are more eager to register and grant than ever before, and are increasingly embracing the health humanities as a path to salvation.
As more and more students pursue a profession or preprofession in health science, courses in the history of pain and illness, medical ethics, and medicine and public health will be offered to their future nurses and health caretakers. Provides a way to appeal, doctors seeking a broad background not only in science, but also in the human and moral aspects of health, illness and illness.
The health humanities are fields of research, education and practice, Routledge companion to the health humanitiesProvides “a comprehensive, democratic, activist, applied, critical, and culturally diverse approach to providing health and well-being …”. It:
- Investigate the relationship between health problems and social equality.
- “Develop humanist theory in relation to health and social care practices.”
- It emphasizes the value of interpretation as opposed to purely quantitative methods in health research.
- “Foreground is cultural differences as a resource for positive changes in society.”
- We will critically examine the “humanity of the increasingly globalized medical system.”
- Introducing “unfamiliar, prominent, or well-known” treatments and practices.
- Shows “the values and health benefits of the arts and humanities”.
In short, the Health Humanities provides an important perspective on health policy, practice, and health technology. In this area, we compare and contrast different cultural traditions and their perspectives on health and illness, with the patient’s perspective in the foreground, and which are applied arts, expression therapies, and humanitarian perspectives (such as narrative medicine and music art therapy). Shows how we can contribute to improvement in physical and mental well-being.
The successor to the rather early medical humanities, the Health Humanities, represents more than a “change in naming”. Proponents are trying to foreground groups that have tended to be pushed to the limits in the medical humanities and the practice of medicine itself. This area, which pays great attention to diversity, crossing and inequality, places particular emphasis on instilling cross-cultural sensitivity, empathy and compassion in the training of medical professionals.
However, despite increased visibility in all disciplines, the course of healthy humanity is as relevant as the classes of health sociology or health informatics or health policy or health economics, as well as biology. It remains difficult to convince many future health sciences majors that they are sexual or meaningful. Chemistry, and physics.
However, a new book by a classic historian offers a fresh and highly compelling strategy for attracting students to biomedicine from a more human perspective.Kyle Harper’s Epidemics on Earth: Diseases and the History of MankindIt hasn’t received some of the attention it deserves, but it’s far more than the traditional work of a medical history.
Sure, this book contains a lot of familiar stories, but it’s always from a fresh perspective. Alongside the most notorious “celebrity” illnesses – bubonic plague, chicken pox, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, mumps cold, polio, rubella, scarlet fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, intestinal typhoid, typhus, hoop cough, Yellow fever – a new tropical disease that is ignored.
You can read about Black Death, the Irish Potato Famine, the Great Famine, as well as many other devastations and plagues around the world, and why some areas suffered so badly and others escaped. .. The heroes of Eurocentric medicine are there – Erich, Fleming, Koch, Jenner, Lister, Pasteur, Sabin, Soak and many more – but sub-Saharan Africa like China, India, Islamic Middle East and Ibn Khaldun. Africa.
So how is this book unique? In that span and scope, he produced works that were not Eurocentric. Its data and methodology. Its clarity. A challenge to traditional historical stories. Attention to the various effects of illness and its socio-economic, political and military effects. Focus on slavery, contract labor, colonialism, early urbanization, the birth of prisons and hospitals, and the human costs of the military revolution, which has increased the frequency and scale of armed conflict. In particular, it focuses on the historical interactions of demography, ecology, economics, environment, and evolution.
As the author explains the central theme of his book, “Human history shapes the ecology of disease and the evolution of pathogens, and the ecology of disease and the evolution of pathogens shape the flow of human history. Our bacteria are a product of our history, and our history is decisively patterned by the fight against infectious diseases. “
Here are some of the most notable contributions of this work.
1. This is a truly global history of infectious, microbial, vector-mediated, gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases, and various parasites and pathogens (fungi, worms, protozoa, bacteria, viruses). How it shaped the history of mankind from the time of parasites to the present.
2. Take advantage of the latest discoveries in evolutionary biology, genetics, genomics, microbiology, paleopathology, phylogeny, and primatology to challenge established disease chronology.
3. It is a scholarship that shows how most human diseases historically originated from wildlife and how livestock (cattle, pigs, sheep, horses, etc.) acted as a bridge to evolution. Contribute to.
4. Use archaeological DNA studies to radically modify the chronology of the disease. For example, it shows that many of the illnesses we consider timeless have actually emerged relatively recently.
5. Provides very clear and easy-to-understand discussions on difficult themes such as horizontal gene transfer, zoonotic bridges, and other technical topics.
6. It is centered on diseases, bacteria and viruses, and is interested in the effects of diseases on plants and animals as well as humans.
7. It challenges the assumption that the history of health and disease prevention is a clear story of progress.
8. It reveals how the effects and reactions of illness are affected by the age structure, population density, geographical distribution, household organization, class organization, technology and mode of production, and political system of a particular society. ..
9. It emphasizes illness as a causative agent of migration patterns, military issues, religious beliefs, social interactions, national functions, and historical changes that have a profound impact on war.
The book is full of fascinating information, such as the fact that chimpanzee cousins ”can tolerate only a small part of the viral diversity we do,” but the number is much smaller.
Although this book is organized in chronological order, it is not an antiquarian. Its historic story begins with agriculture and animal breeding, and new “progress” that emerges in economic productivity, social arrangements, class differentiation, long-distance trade, and regional and global interrelationships. A pool showing how the pathogen contributed to the invasion of human disease. It also decisively shows that the problems it addresses are beyond history.
Of course, Harper wasn’t the first to write a jumbo history of illness and history, and his book begs for a comparison with William H. O’Neill’s 1975 classic. Plague and peopleHe emphasized Alfred Crosby’s work on the role of global interactions in the spread of disease, and the biological and ecological consequences of the Age of Discovery in Europe. However, Harper’s work has benefited greatly from recent genetics, archeology, and archaeological research, bringing great nuances to these early histories, for example, the depopulation of the indigenous peoples of the New World. Shows the role of colonial violence and labor exploitation in.
Harper’s history is also quite different from Siddhartha Mukazi’s eloquent, fascinating, clear and even poetic one, which won the Pulitzer Prize. All Maradi Emperors: Biography of Cancer, All of its many strengths are old-fashioned medical histories. A record of “magnificent battles” to “cure, control and conquer” cancer, with a focus primarily on ingenuity, patience and determination, but also “arrogance”. , Fatherhood, and misunderstandings, ”, generations of surgeons, bedside doctors, and laboratory scientists.
A rich and radical scholarship work that takes years to study and write Harper, the book’s spade work began long before the current pandemic. COVID is certainly mentioned, but it does not occupy a central stage and emphasizes one of Harper’s most compelling themes. Evolve and circulate.
Harper’s book concludes: “For scholars studying the past or present of infectious diseases, a pandemic was a completely inevitable disaster. […] Its contours are predictable and its details are essentially random. “
The humanities can actually make a significant contribution to medical research by providing the big picture that people studying a particular era, society, or illness are all often overlooked. Not all reviewers share my enthusiasm for Harper’s books. In the future, non-infectious causes of death, including cancer, cardiovascular and degenerative diseases, and various chronic disorders and disorders with an increasing rate of death in our time, and chemical contaminants, additives, and Genetic manipulation that affects our health. But for now, thank Harper for what he did.
By integrating history, demography, economics, evolutionary biology, and genomics into a seamless story, he eloquently or convincingly does what I have never seen before. The perspective provided by the humanities.
Stephen Mints is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
