Title: Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication
University: James Madison University
Email: kleinmj@jmu.edu
Twitter: mkleinhokie
Website: http://educ.jmu.edu/~kleinmj/
Description of Work:
I am a mid-career scholar who holds administrative roles in graduate education and medical humanities. This project is a collaborative examination of the ways in which narrative medicine can act as a bridge between rhm and critical medical humanities. Narrative medicine interrogates assumptions held by medical practitioners by providing a space/voice for patients, caregivers and clinicians. It also allows for reflection of the assumptions held by the medical establishment by opening up discussions to more and varied stakeholders on an equal footing to those traditionally considered experts.
In a more general sense, I am thinking about ways that the media and popularizations of health and medicine affect the ways in which we view the body and knowledge making surrounding issues of health and wellness.
Symposium Submission:
“Moved by the Stories of Illness”: Productive Convergences in the Medical Humanities and the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine
This article will use Rita Charon’s text Narrative Medicine as a case study to examine productive tension between the medical humanities (MH) and the emerging discipline of the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). After an examination of how and why RHM might be defining itself as separate from MH, we argue that narrative medicine, particularly Charon’s text, provides a theoretical space where the two fields’ disparate aims are clarified and their potential points of generative contact are resolved. Thus, we “explore the intersections and tensions between RHM and the medical humanities” while, simultaneously, offering ways that RHM can “complement the medical humanities” and “the medical humanities complement RHM.”
Those interested in thinking through how to best continue and extend the impressive work of medical rhetoricians over the past twenty years might wonder why and how RHM is slated as distinct from and perhaps even in opposition to MH. Belinda Jack (2015) explains that medical professionals might attribute hostile aims to those working in the medical humanities. Thus, if the humanities in general suffer from the popular perception of their irrelevance, the MHs are perhaps especially susceptible to such criticisms. Scott, Segal, and Keränen (2013) point out that “rather than positioning rhetorical negotiation in opposition to evidence-based medicine […] we might ask how the latter’s implementation is embedded in the former” (p. 2) RHM, thus, is distinct from MH in its desire to put rhetoric to work in the trenches with medical professionals and to uncover how rhetorical concepts are always already present in everyday medical practices. While the current shift in MH toward “critical medical humanities” might be read as MH’s move to do similar work, RHM’s privileging of rhetoric over the humanities make the aim more emphatic. Still, RHM has much to gain from productive convergences with the MHs, and narrative medicine via Charon’s text offers a site for examining these points of contact.
Using Charon’s Narrative Medicine, revisited through the dual lenses of MH and RHM, we ultimately argue that the tensions between RHM and MH are generative. Further, Charon’s text allows us to articulate the fact that, despite disciplinary divergences, RHM and MH share a core epistemological identity in their interest in “ameliorative aims” (Scott, Segal, & Keränen, 2013 p. 2). That is, both MH and RHM draw from narrative medicine’s goal to better understand and improve patients’ experiences by listening to and treating the “whole” person. Within our rereading, we offer a discussion of the rhetorical effects Charon’s seminal text has had on subsequent texts in multiple disciplines, as well as of how narrative medicine in general can help to more fully account for and hone productive tensions between the medical humanities and the rhetoric of health and medicine.
References
Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford UP, 2008.
Jack, Belinda. “The Rise of the Medical Humanities.” Times Higher Education. January 22, 2015.
Scott, Blake; Segal, Judy Z.; and Keranen, Lisa. “The Rhetorics of Health and Medicine: Inventional Possibilities for Scholarship and Engaged Practice.” Poroi 9, Iss. 1 (2013): Article 17.