Dissertations in the Medical Humanities

The most recent doctoral dissertations in the medical humanities are up at the University of Pittsburgh's general collation.  Lots of interesting titles over there.

(h/t H-SCI-MED-TECH listserv) 

Note: While there are many titles and apparent approaches relevant both to the MH and to health policy at the web site, IMO none of the titles I reviewed are primarily about the medical humanities.  What I mean is that the MH are, IMO, not merely the sum of its disciplinary parts.  MH is not just history of medicine + cultural studies + literature & medicine + ethics in medicine,etc.  The MH are, like most true interdisciplinary fields, emergent; they arise out of work in disciplines without being reducible to them.

While I'm certainly not contending there is an essence of the MH, I do think it's important to note that the MH are not simply the sum of "humanities" work as applied to medicine.  The humanities, understood historically and contextually, do supply a way of conceiving of the world and (wo)man's place in it, and the best source for this is by examining the medieval and Renaissance humanists themselves.  What did they believe? What were their motivations? Why did they eschew Scholasticism? Are the answers to these questions instructive for contemporary social and cultural critics of medical and scientific practice? (If the answer to this is 'no,' I'm in a lot of trouble!) How so?

I look forward to having the opportunity to discuss these and other ideas at the conference next week marking the 25-year-anniversary of the graduate program in the medical humanities at UTMB (my current program).  Those who are attending; please feel free to say hello.