Critical Interventions in the Medical Humanities
Abstract
This thesis makes three novel critical theoretical interventions in the medical humanities. The first uses Benjamin’s critical theory of art in the age of its technological reproducibility to reveal that the evidence-based biomedical model’s primary function is not to cure patients, but to prescribe politics. The technological reproducibility of evidence-based biomedicine transforms medicine so it can no longer perceive—or encounter—patients as unique, whole, and above all situated beings. The second intervention uses Sara Ahmed’s feminist phenomenology to theorize ethical encounters between medicine and its “others”—patients and literature—in such a way that particularizes the encounter, not the other itself. This theoretical maneuver re-accounts for unique, situated patients without essentializing them. The third intervention proposes a medical inhumanities that recognizes what conditions produce inhumanity in medicine’s encounters with others, like the encounter between a mentally ill refugee and evidence-based biomedicine in Rawi Hage’s novel Cockroach.