ABSTRACT
The health humanities, particularly the subfield of literature and medicine, usually takes individual experiences of illness and healing as the central focus. Scholars draw on literature and related expressive forms as a resource for understanding the illness experience; analyze literary representations of health providers; or, less frequently, use literary-critical methods to unpack biomedical discourse and its cultural implications. Within health-professional education, the humanities are valued for fostering skills and sensibilities crucial for developing empathic one-to-one human relationships, especially between provider and patient. Narrative medicine, too, is a discipline primarily focused on the patient–provider interface. But literature and medicine and the broader field of health humanities should devote more attention to health care as a complex, often fragmented system that comprises funding and delivery models, institutional and governmental practices and policies, and numerous individuals whose roles range well beyond patient and provider. Literary works that yield nuanced insights about health care as a system range, for example, from realist novels such as Robert Herrick’s The Web of Life (1900) and Lionel Shriver’s So Much for All That (2010), to works of dystopian fiction such as Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) and the film Elysium (2013, dir. Neill Blomkamp).
