It is a pleasure to introduce this roundtable‚ based on papers from the International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science held at the University of Birmingham in 2024 under the auspices of “Health Humanities,” a variant term for Medical Humanities.Footnote ¹ It is a century since “Medical” and “Humanities” first came together in this singular expression that initially referred to scholarly work spanning the borderlands between medicine, medical history, literature, art, and philosophy.Footnote ²

The term “Medical Humanities” was modelled on the intersectionality of George Sarton’s overarching conception of history of science as a tool that could unlock the contributions of the sciences to civilizations and the growth of knowledge. For Sarton, the sciences and history were exemplar makers of knowledge, with history a “humanizing” force that generated insights into the intellectual, social, and human circumstances in which scientists defined and worked on scientific problems in different periods and cultures.Footnote ³ In the medical context, such historical study invoked conceptual configurations that situated medicine not only in relation to its past but in its dealings with other subject areas gathered under the cover term of “the humanities.” The expression “Medical Humanities” was forged at a time when a critique of biomedical instrumentalism sought to moderate the effects of growing numbers of medical specialisms and scientific techniques impinging on clinical work. An elite group of generalist physicians opposed these developments, arguing that clinical assessment of sick individuals was grounded in broad interpretive skills that take distinctively human factors into consideration, rather than on the narrowed focus of specialists, dependent on tests conducted in laboratories of bacteriology and biochemistry distant from the bedside.Footnote ⁴

Two papers from the 2024 Literature and Science meeting share an overlapping interest in what counts as human in medical settings. Nathaniel Otjen’s paper, “Pandemic Persons: Being Human in a Time of COVID” is concerned with the roles animals played—obscured from public view—in the development and trialling of COVID-19 immunizations, while Davinia Höll in “Emerging Knowledge in Times of Crisis,” considers how Adam Dickinson’s poetico-scientific collection Anatomic bears on the anthropogenic chemo-biomes with which humans share their lives. Underlying both papers is a “microbiopolitics” that deconstructs the threatening and abjected “microbial ‘Other’ ” in light of the relationships between “higher creatures” and their altered microbiomes, damaged by processed foods, pollution, and antibiotic use (a theme explored in the first volume of Public Humanities).Footnote ⁵ As Davinia Höll recounts elsewhere, “we have never been individuals,” each of us is a multispecies teeming with nonhumans.Footnote ⁶ Otjen and Höll share a deep engagement with interspecies mutualism and the place of humans within the intricate interdependencies of animate and inanimate environments.

In “Contemporary Poetry as a Dissection Tool for the Study of Anatomy in Medical Education” Jasmine Tan delves into the humanizing potentials of poetry through an exploration of Linda Bierds’s verses, which counterpoint humanistic and objectifying conceptions of the dead body. In a consideration of the ekphrastic expressions in Bierds’s poetry, Tan unpacks a role for verses in the education of medical students. She makes a powerful case for the capacity of corpse poetry in the setting of the dissecting-room itself to awaken a different kind of visualization from that tendered by physical dissection.Footnote ⁷ By reframing the anatomical object of study as a once embodied subject, “poetic dissection” parallels and dialogues with dismemberment by the scalpel, countermanding the diminished humanity of the dissected corpse.Footnote ⁸ In the face of death and the bathos of the anatomized body in its most objectified, dismantled state, “poetic dissection” envisions its humanity and poses questions about what it means to be a dissected human.

In “Cognitive Augmentation in Speculative Writing,” Martina Zimmermann compares and contrasts readings of a work of popular science and a work of science fiction—Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind and Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists—and shows that although these works inhabit different cultural spaces and approach human cognition from differing angles, both predict and project its augmentation in ways that reinforce negative views of ageing. In an effort to refigure ageing as a lifelong process rather than as one which takes place at a particular stage of life—accompanied by a greater likelihood of disease without itself being a disease—Zimmermann partners with community and cultural organizations in confronting prevailing pessimisms about growing old. In common with many Medical Humanities scholars, her research engages with, and aims to learn from, the knowledge, attitudes, and reasonings of relevant publics, and to shape health and social policies.Footnote ⁹ For Zimmermann, “the social practices to which illness gives rise are the central object of the medical humanities.”Footnote ¹⁰

In an examination of the difference between objects of interest to the sciences and to the humanities, Jeffrey Wilson considers whether medicine should be counted as a science or an interpretative craft affiliated with the humanities. He suggests “naturally occurring phenomena, things that humans didn’t invent, such as the rocks, stars … [and] the circulation of blood” typify objects of interest to the natural sciences, whereas the “humanities study the things humans make.”Footnote ¹¹ Yet some objects of interest to medicine appear to be “hybrid objects,” such as narratives of bodily and mental dysfunctions and intimations of dis-ease, agglomerations of sensations and feelings, similar in type to humanly construed patterns of interest to the humanities.Footnote ¹²

Whether going by the name of Medical or Health Humanities, the field’s origins and objects of interest—its ambit and approaches to research—lie in the borderlands between the biosciences, medicine, and the humanities. The papers presented at this roundtable work on texts, contexts, and representations of biosocial phenomena that highlight inter-relational tensions set up by dichotomies between the “animate” and “inanimate,” “individual” and “group,” the “autonomous” and “dependent,” the “natural” and “invented.” As well as their abilities to shape public and policy discussions, the Public Humanities credentials of Medical Humanities research reside in reflective and interpretive methods that articulate conceptual transfers taking place across such apparent binaries, which disrupt the cognitive and linguistic means these divarications impose in ordering versions of the world.