Call for Papers for the Special Collection on Health Humanities

The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. — Sir William Osler

Statement of purpose

Health humanities is a rapidly growing transdisciplinary field and agenda-setting movement that incorporates aspects of the arts and humanities to health and health care. Embracing various branches of humanities and social sciences such as religious studies, cultural and language studies, history, philosophy, anthropology and sociology, health humanities not only illuminates the nuances of human condition but also has a wide-ranging application to medical education and health practices. Although health humanities began its journey as medical humanities, it took a decisive cultural turn towards developing a larger framework which considers sociocultural factors (such as race, class among others) and incorporates multiple stakeholders such as the patient, caregivers and physicians. In a recently published Research Methods in Health Humanities, Craig M. Klugman et. al. differentiating health humanities from medical humanities characterize health humanities as a value based applied enterprise that parses health not only within sociocultural context but also moves beyond medicine which, as Jones argues, is “only a minor determinant of health” (933). Health humanities in the way of working towards health justice also critiques the excesses of technological, medical and capitalist interventions and, in so doing, exposes normative visions and unacknowledged assumptions of medicine and healthcare. Furthermore, health humanities offers a range of critical tools to evaluate various types of knowledge production within the institutional spaces of medicine and its attendant social and cultural settings. In a way, health humanities while bridging the “two cultures” of humanities and sciences as imagined by the British novelist and scientist C. P. Snow in his 1959 Rede Lecture also draws together the voices of patients, health care practitioners, and researchers to offer a humanistic, holistic and granular understanding of health, illness and well-being.

Health humanities relates to anyone who is interested and invested in the discourses and practices of health, illness and wellness. Having said that, it is particularly relevant for practitioners, patients, and students in different and specific ways. For patients, it is a ready reckoner which offers them with diagnostic advice, treatment options, coping and prognosis through the author’s experience. It also minimizes feelings of isolation through forming relationship and communities, thus paving way to new forms of affiliation. For medical practitioners and pre-medical students, health humanities offers insights into experiential realms of illness and health which are often underappreciated in biomedical discourse. In this sense, health humanities triggers moral, ethical and non-medical imagination in its stakeholders, thus gauging the total range of illness experience and disease condition. In essence, health humanities provides a bottom up health care knowledge.

Given the transdisciplinary breath of health humanities, the thematic scope of the field is wide-ranging—for instance, medical negligence; ruthless professionalism and the vexed doctor-patient relationship; industrialism and commercialization of health care; patient identity; role of insurance providers; challenges of caretaking; ethics; and demands of being a doctor, among others.

The “Health Humanities” section of Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities is particularly interested in cultural/literary/philosophical perspectives of health, illness and well-being. Cultural/literary reading of health humanities emphasizes medicine as a set of cultural practice, reveals the cultural and social aspects of medicine and brings into relief the materialistic implications of language and interpersonal communication. Cultural/literary approach of health humanities also concerns with the representation and other artifacts of creative cultural production about various disease/illness conditions and their functions in public spaces and private worlds.

As a journal which has always been in the forefront in advancing knowledge in the humanities and arts, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities is committed to encouraging interdisciplinarity in humanities. While health, illness and well-being are perennial themes in human life, the current pandemic has only reanimated these concepts. As health humanities is still in its nascence in India, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities takes pride in introducing and promoting health humanities as an academic specialty for Indian audience.

Article types/themes

The focus of the health humanities section is to publish original research on thematic elements as mentioned below. Papers in no more than 6,000 words (excluding abstract and works cited) should be submitted to the Section Editor. Occasionally, graphic essays/interviews/book reviews/guest essays/conference reports/review essays (up to 3000 words) will be considered through a mix of commissioned articles and a dedicated call for papers. Creative work (poetry/short story/non-fiction etc.), statistically informed empirical studies, medical reports, and medically inflected articles will not be considered for publication. The research essays should strictly adhere to the format prescribed by the journal and should be free of plagiarism.  Submission of a manuscript to the health humanities section of the journal also implies that the work is not under consideration for publication anywhere else. Potential topic areas include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Graphic medicine
  • Representation and applications of health/illness in various media (eg. painting/films/sculpture/digital storytelling/dance/photography)
  • Teaching health humanities/Medical pedagogy
  • History and global development of Health Humanities
  • Health semiotics
  • Ethics: biomedical ethics
  • Creative representation of medicine/health in literature
  • Philosophy of health and illness
  • Health and politics: biogovernmentality, biopower, biosecurity
  • Health and intersectionality: geography, race, gender, sexuality, religion
  • Health humanities and inclusion: LGBTQI+, ableism, human rights
  • (Post/de-/pre-) colonial environments and health
  • Pandemics/Epidemics (eg. SARS, Covid-19, Flu) and cultural memory
  • Narrative Medicine
  • Health humanities in India
  • Critiques and possibilities of medical technology
  • Cultures of mental health and illness (eg. Depression, bipolar disorder)
  • Ethics of caring and nursing
  • Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)
  • Health and healing
  • Digital health humanities
  • Indigenous Arts-based methods

Submission guidelines

Submission is closed now.

General submission guidelines

Submission requirements can be found at http://rupkatha.com/submissionguidelines.php

Publishing model

All research articles in health humanities section of Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities will be published under Continuous Publication Model and the published articles will create a Special Collection in the Journal.

Health Humanities Resources

Dr. Sathyaraj Venkatesan, the Section Editor of health humanities, recommends the following.

Select books

  • Health Humanities.Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, Charley Baker, Victoria Tischler, Brian Abrams.
  • Medical Humanities: An Introduction. Thomas R. Cole, Nathan S. Carlin, Ronald A. Carson.
  • Health Humanities Reader. Therese Jones, Delese Wear, Lester D. Friedman.
  • Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities. Victoria Bates, Alan Bleakley, Sam Goodman.
  • The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities. Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, Andrea Charise.

Select journals

  • Literature and Medicine
  • Perspective in Biology and Medicine
  • Medical Humanities
  • Journal of Medical Humanities

Select websites

Health related database

Sample essays and additional information

Sample essay by the Section Editor, Dr. Sathyaraj Venkatesan, is available at https://nitt.academia.edu/SathyarajVenkatesan.

For additional information or assistance, contact the Section Editor at hhrupkatha@gmail.com