ABSTRACT
Chapter Four explores medical humanities through narratives of different conferences and the literature to establish the background against which suffering is figured. The previous chapter laid out the fabric of suffering as being characterised by domains of self, identity and other, the social matrix and materiality of the body almost like a patchwork in a quilt. These domains connect through relational models that include pedagogy and spirituality, and are crossed by a fault line or epistemic gap that threatens that relationality through reversals and absences. In suffering, a parallel process that runs alongside biomedical science, the meta task seems to be stitching across the fault line, moving between acting and languishing, by maintaining an awareness that all domains and properties are necessary for that process in order to see beyond surface appearances. Medical humanities can deepen this awareness through art and literature. Art as science is suggested as a more fruitful approach than the traditional dichotomy that typically plagues debates about the medical humanities. Breaking out of circular thinking is suggested by going back to the fundamental understandings of how we know what we know. Whilst both medical humanities and sociology question the use of arts and humanities in service of what is considered the self in medicine, they are at risk of staying at the level of disciplining medicine and the self whilst excluding knowledge that does not fit with the rational socialised individual if there is not the awareness of the various domains and properties described.
