Liberation Medicine
Past, Present, and Future
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5599264 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Amand-Gabriel Führer (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg), Julia Vorhölter (0000-0003-1343-9920, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-16 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Culture Medicine and Psychiatry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0165-005X • E-ISSN: 1573-076X |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s11013-025-09949-w |
| PMID | 41099927 |
| OpenAlex | W4415246313 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 47 |
In her book Death Without Weeping (1992), Nancy Scheper-Hughes coined the term "liberation medicine," which aims to place the individual experience of illness in a larger social context and use it as a starting point for critical thinking and resistance. Illness, so the basic premise of liberation medicine, is a form of resistance that can be turned into an effective political strategy. Accordingly, medicine is understood to have the potential for a "critical practice of freedom" that can create spaces for patients and medical staff in which new ways of dealing with human suffering are negotiated. Taking Scheper-Hughes's reflections as a starting point, this editorial introduction to the special section conceptually develops the notion of liberation medicine, outlines how it relates to similar concepts and debates, and sketches what it might mean in the contemporary era. We argue that radically rethinking health and health care is a powerful way to rethink, and change, society at large. In this sense, we understand liberation medicine, following Wilder (2022), as a "concrete utopia
Empathy and Medical Education · Healthcare cost, quality, practices · Mental Health and Psychiatry
Dying in the city of the blues
Epidemiology and the People’s Health
Renegade Dreams
Death Without Weeping
Structural Competency
The Wounded Storyteller
Philosophy Of Liberation (1980)
Body and Soul
Power matters
Against Humanity
Making It Crazy
The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844
Feminist, Queer, Crip
Infections and inequalities
Clinical Subjectivation
Care Wounds
Discrimination and Health Inequities
Concrete Utopianism
Confronting the Illness of Recognition
Seasoned Veterans of the Waiting Room
The Uses of Neoliberalism
Structural competency
Here It is Not About Learning Evidence-Based Medicine; It is About Medicine Based on that Which is
Asylums
The Mindful Body
Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia1
Undercommoning Anthrogenesis
Dynamics of wilful blindness
Physician Anthropologists
Latin American Social Medicine in Colombia
Music and Trance as Methods for Engaging with Suffering
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |