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Books

KEYWORDS FOR HEALTH HUMANITIES

Coedited with Jonathan M. Metzl and Priscilla Wald

New York University Press, August 2023

Introduces key concepts and debates in health humanities and the health professions.

Keywords for Health Humanities provides a rich, interdisciplinary vocabulary for the burgeoning field of health humanities and, more broadly, for the study of medicine and health. Sixty-five entries by leading international scholars examine current practices, ideas, histories, and debates around health and illness, revealing the social, cultural, and political factors that structure health conditions and shape health outcomes.

Presenting possibilities for health justice and social change, this volume exposes readers―from curious beginners to cultural analysts, from medical students to health care practitioners of all fields―to lively debates about the complexities of health and illness and their ethical and political implications. A study of the vocabulary that comprises and shapes a broad understanding of health and the practices of healthcare, Keywords for Health Humanities guides readers toward ways to communicate accurately and effectively while engaging in creative analytical thinking about health and healthcare in an increasingly complex world―one in which seemingly straightforward beliefs and decisions about individual and communal health represent increasingly contested terrain.

https://keywords.nyupress.org/health-humanities/

https://nyupress.org/9781479808106/keywords-for-health-humanities/

The Medical imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States

University of Pennsylvania Press, hardcover 2018/ paperback 2022

In 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Science does not know its debt to imagination," words that still ring true in the worlds of health and health care today. The checklists and clinical algorithms of modern medicine leave little space for imagination, and yet we depend on creativity and ingenuity for the advancement of medicine—to diagnose unusual conditions, to innovate treatment, and to make groundbreaking discoveries. We know a great deal about the empirical aspects of medicine, but we know far less about what the medical imagination is, what it does, how it works, or how we might train it.

In The Medical Imagination, Sari Altschuler argues that this was not always so. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doctors understood the imagination to be directly connected to health, intimately involved in healing, and central to medical discovery. In fact, for physicians and other health writers in the early United States, literature provided important forms for crafting, testing, and implementing theories of health. Reading and writing poetry trained judgment, cultivated inventiveness, sharpened observation, and supplied evidence for medical research, while novels and short stories offered new perspectives and sites for experimenting with original medical theories.

Such imaginative experimentation became most visible at moments of crisis or novelty in American medicine, such as the 1790s yellow fever epidemics, the global cholera pandemics, and the discovery of anesthesia, when conventional wisdom and standard practice failed to produce satisfying answers to pressing questions. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, health research and practice relied on a broader complex of knowing, in which imagination often worked with and alongside observation, experience, and empirical research. In reframing the historical relationship between literature and health, The Medical Imagination provides a usable past for contemporary conversations about the role of the imagination—and the humanities more broadly—in health research and practice today. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15795.html 20% Discount coupon

Essays

"The Gothic Origins of Global Health" -

American Literature (Sept 2017): 557-590.

Read the full text of the final proof here.

Global health traces its origins back to a single moment in 1854 when John Snow stopped cholera with a map. It is a nice story, but it’s a myth, a fantasy of empiricism. The modern global health approach did begin with the nineteenth-century, worldwide cholera pandemics, but cartography was not the principal form associated with this paradigm; it was the gothic. Turning back to the mid-nineteenth-century pandemics, this essay explores the contours of an emergent global health approach on both sides of the Atlantic. It demonstrates why the gothic was the form through which this approach was narrated, how the form worked, and the effects of the genre on popular and medical knowledge. Contemporary global health has been reorganized around scientific empiricism, but elements of its gothic history remain. I conclude by suggesting the value of recuperating these gothic origins for global health today. (September 2017)

https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-abstract/89/3/557/129293/The-Gothic-Origins-of-Global-Health?redirectedFrom=fulltext

“AFTER THE OUTBREAK: NARRATIVE, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND PANDEMIC TIME” (Fall 2021)

Read here.

Before 2020 most Americans thought they knew how outbreaks worked. Outbreaks occur when viruses—always threatening—escape from remote locations in which they are bred. A race against time ensues, but scientists contain the threat. “The outbreak narrative,” in Priscilla Wald’s influential formulation, dominated much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; however, during the Covid-19 pandemic the story failed us. It could not account for life in a pandemic. Key to this failure was a difficulty narrating the infrastructural causes of pandemics, one that has its roots in the nineteenth-century origins of modern global health. “After the Outbreak” tracks the narratives that surfaced during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, lingering in the suspended time of narrative failure—pandemic time—when we can best see which alternative stories provide useful ways of understanding pandemic life. The essay then turns to the nineteenth-century cholera pandemics, when what we would now call a global health orientation was first developed. It is there that we can identify not only the origins of the outbreak narrative’s failures but also which stories hold lessons for better narrating pandemic time and the roots of pandemics in the infrastructure of global capitalism. Then, as now, narratives emerging from Black pandemic experience teach us much not only about how to see structural and infrastructural causes but about how to seek meaningful change.

"Clinician as editor: notes in the era of ai scribes”

Sari Altschuler, Ian Huntington, Maria Antoniak, and Lauren F. Klein

Lancet (November 30, 2024): 6-7.

"TEXTURING THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES: A MANIFESTO”

Co-authored with David Weimer.

PMLA (January 2020): 74-91.

The digital humanities is today overwhelmingly visual. Even as DH has increased access to the humanities at an astonishing rate, it has also inadvertently narrowed our sensory access to information. It is time to add new dimensions to a field structured predominately by the flat screen. Emphasizing touch, we call for a textured digital humanities that challenges the logic governing many notions of access—that is, the unproblematic translatability of information between the senses. As an epistemological intervention, texturing DH promises new ways to approach sensorial history and to engage diverse sensorial abilities and experiences—past, present, and future. As an ethical intervention, it emphasizes our responsibility to evaluate carefully the structures of digital accessibility and to increase access for all.

“The Medical imagination”

(November 2016)

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(16)32080-3.pdf

"Babo’s ‘mute’-ny: deaf culture and black testimony in antebellum America”

PMLA (October 2023): 1149-1164.

Readers of Benito Cereno, Melville’s only story about slavery, have long debated whether the Black mutineers aboard the San Dominick are, as the narrator suggests, “voiceless.” This essay begins with the self-fashioned muteness of the rebellion’s leaders to offer a new linguistic genealogy of the novella, unpacking how Melville uses the cultural and legal structures of muteness to reframe Black communication. The category mute organizes the story’s description, characterization, dialogue, and mode and structures the conditions of possibility for Black testimony. Such lessons were, the story’s publication context reveals, more available to Melville’s original readers. In showing how cultural and legal structures associated with disability served as resources for Black rights, this essay reveals how structurally intersectional analysis can resurface central aspects of a text. The cultural and legal history of Deaf culture make sites of Black communication and the possibility of Black testimony in Melville’s novella legible once more.

“Covid-19”

A forum co-edited with Priscilla Wald

American Literature (December 2020)

Forum introduction, “COVID-19: Pandemic Reading” available here.

"TOUCHING THE SCARLET LETTER: WHAT DISABILITY HISTORY CAN TEACH US ABOUT LITERATURE”

American Literature (March 2020): 91-122.

** Winner of the 1921 Prize in American Literature from the American Literature Society **

This essay demonstrates the value of disability history for literary and cultural studies. It develops historical cripistemology as a method through which to examine the historical experiences and epistemologies, rather than representations, of disability in particular times and places and emphasizes the vast and varied entanglements of those experiences and epistemologies with mainstream US culture. To do so, “Touching The Scarlet Letter” turns to perhaps the most canonical American novel to show how returning disability history to a text—here Nathaniel Hawthorne’s connections to and interest in blind education as well as the extensive cultural influence of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind in the 1840s and 1850s—can reframe fundamental aspects of our analyses, such as how we understand reading and interpretation. In so doing, this essay argues for and begins to uncover a hidden disability history of US literature and culture.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-abstract/92/1/91/156877/Touching-The-Scarlet-Letter-What-Disability

Public Digital Humanities

Access the exhibition at touchthispage.com.

Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read is an exhibition about multisensory experiences of reading. Its central objects are 3D replicas from historical books for blind and low-vision readers printed between 1830 and 1910. Most of these archival materials live at the Samuel P. Hayes Research Library at the Perkins School for the Blind. We hope that, by experiencing 3D-printed objects, visitors will reflect on how touch, sight, and sound contribute to experiences of reading—historically and today. Simultaneously, the story of these tactile pages guides visitors through a particular slice of disability history and current barriers to access understood through the principles of universal design.

A pop-up style version of the exhibition was hosted simultaneously at four locations during its initial launch: Harvard University’s Lamont Library, Northeastern University’s Snell Library, the Perkins School for the Blind, and Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library (at Copley Square). It ran from January through June 2019. Other regional locations were added for Fall 2019 - Spring 2020. The web exhibition at touchthispage.com hosts all content from the physical exhibition including the files of the pages from the Perkins archive at so that anyone with access to a 3D printer can reproduce the exhibition and its objects.

Touch This Page! is co-directed by Sari Altschuler (Northeastern University) and David Weimer (Harvard Library) and undertaken in collaboration with Dan Cohen at the Northeastern Library, Waleed Meleis at the Northeastern University College of Engineering, and Kim Charlson, Jennifer Arnott, and Jen Hale at the Perkins School for the Blind.

Special Issues