Sari Altschuler. The Medical Imagination

In The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States, literary scholar and historian Sari Altschuler demands a reconsideration of the role of imaginative thinking in early American medical knowledge production. Rooted in an interrogation of the works of nineteenth-century literary doctors, Altschuler argues that, rather than “literature simply reflecting medical ideas of the period,” nineteenth-century physicians such as Benjamin Rush, Samuel George Morton, and Oliver Wendell Holmes used imaginative writing as a way to produce new medical concepts that could not be ascertained through empirical observation (p. 18-19). Thus, The Medical Imagination asks readers to not just re-examine the relationship between early American fiction and medicine, but also the potential modern-day application of humanistic “creative analytic thinking” in contemporary medical training, especially in the medical humanities classroom (p. 200). Both Altschuler’s analysis of early American medicine and her critique of empathy-centric medical humanities programs make The Medical Imagination essential reading for historians of medicine and a new starting point for thinking about the pedagogical value of the medical humanities.

Aesthetics · Art · Empathy · Humanism · Interrogation · Literature · Medical education · Medical humanities · Period (music) · Political science · Reading (process) · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology