This book is situated in the field of medical humanities, and the articles continue the dialogue between the disciplines of literature and medicine that was initiated in the 1970s and has continued with ebbs and flows since then. Recently, the need to renew that interdisciplinary dialogue between these two fields, which are both concerned with the human condition, has resurfaced in the face of institutional challenges, such as shrinking resources and the disappearance of many spaces devoted to the exchange of ideas between humanists and scientists. This volume presents cutting-edge research by scholars keen on not only maintaining but also enlivening that dialogue. They come from a variety of cultural, academic, and disciplinary backgrounds and their essays are organized in four thematic clusters: pedagogy, the mind-body connection, alterity, and medical practice.

This book is situated in the field of medical humanities, and the articles continue the dialogue between the disciplines of literature and medicine that was initiated in the 1970s and has continued with ebbs and flows since then. Recently, the need to renew that interdisciplinary dialogue between these two fields, which are both concerned with the human condition, has resurfaced in the face of institutional challenges, such as shrinking resources and the disappearance of many spaces devoted to the exchange of ideas between humanists and scientists. This volume presents cutting-edge research by scholars keen on not only maintaining but also enlivening that dialogue. They come from a variety of cultural, academic, and disciplinary backgrounds and their essays are organized in four thematic clusters: pedagogy, the mind-body connection, alterity, and medical practice.

1. ​Introduction: Bridging the Divide: Literature and Medicine - Stephanie M. Hilger.- 2. Reading and Writing One’s Way to Wellness: The History of Bibliotherapy and Scriptotherapy - Janella Moy.- 3. Why Teach Literature and Medicine? Answers from Three Decades - Anne Hudson Jones.- 4. Intellectual Cosmopolitanism as Stewardship in Medical Humanities and Undergraduate Writing Pedagogy - Lisa DeTora.- 6. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Teaching an Interdisciplinary Course on “A Cultural and Evolutionary History of Sexuality” But Were Afraid to Ask - Jennifer Hellwarth and Ronald Mumme.- 7. Medical Professionalism: Using Literary Narrative to Explore and Evaluate Medical Professionalism - Ronald Schleifer, Jerry Vannatta, and Casey Hester.- 8. Mind, Breath, and Voice in Chaucer’s Romance Writing - Corinne Saunders.- 9. Affect and the Organs in the Anatomical Poems of Paul Celan: Encountering Medical Discourse - Vasiliki Dimoula.- 10. Reading theDSM-5 through Literature: The Value of Subjective Knowing - Christine Marks.- 11.Anecdotal Evidence: What Patient Poets Provide - Marilyn McEntyre.- 12. “L’Œuil Gauche Barré:” Migraine, Scotoma, and Allied Disorders in Emile Zola’s Novels - Janice Zehentbauer.- 13. Corporeal Abnormality as Intellectual and Cultural Capital: Jean Fernel’sPathologiae Libri, Ambroise Paré’s Monstres et Prodiges and Michel de Montaigne’sEssais - Yuri Kondratiev.- 14.The Primacy of Touch: Helen Keller’s Embodiment of Language - Sun Jai Kim.- 15. Unsound Elegy: Breast Cancer inThe Dying Animal by Philip Roth and Elegy by Isabel Coixet - Federica Frediani. 16. Reading Colonial Dis-ease/Disease in Hong Kong Modernist Fiction - C.T. Au.- 17. Anandibai Joshi’s Passage to America (and More): The Making of a Hindu Lady Doctor - Sandhya Shetty.- 18. The Introduction of Moxibustion and Acupuncture in Europe from the Early Modern Period to the Nineteenth Century - Giovanni Borriello.- 19. Midwives and Spin Doctors: The Rhetoric of Authority in Early Modern French Medicine - Ophelie Chavaroche.- 20. The Changing Face of Quack Doctors: Satirizing Mountebanks and Physicians in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England - Genice Ngg.- 21. Medical Tourism in Victorian Edinburgh: Writing Narratives of Healthy Citizenship - Martin Willis.- 22. Doctor-Writers: Anton Chekhov’s Medical Stories - Carl Fisher.- 23. Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky’s Medical Plays: Chekhov in Chicago - Maria Pia Pagani.