Medical Humanities
The TORCH Medical Humanities Hub is a network of scholars dedicated to promoting humanities-based interdisciplinary work around health, healthcare, and medicine. It organises, supports, and promotes academic and public engagement events and projects. Medical humanities examines the relationship between health and society, situating medicine and disease within their political, social, historical, ethical, and cultural contexts. It often uses ideas, tools and methods from disciplines such as history, art, philosophy, theology, and literature to create innovative strategies for understanding and improving health and healthcare. Decisions about whom to treat or when to treat them, how to prevent disease, and how to fund and develop health services cannot be made on the basis of science alone. They remain contentious ethical and political judgments, reflecting economic realities, contested histories, cultural norms, future aspirations, and socially-conditioned perceptions of risk. Medical humanities brings these judgments to light and enables us to examine them consciously. Most fundamentally, medical humanities understands health and medicine as bound up with the human.
Contact: medhum@torch.ox.ac.uk
To be added to the medical humanities mailing list: medicalhumanities-owner@maillist.ox.ac.uk
Follow us on Twitter/X: @OxMedHum | Find us on OxTalks
Academic Lead: Dr Alberto Giubilini
Events | People | Projects | Blogs | Opportunities
