Pilgrimages – how can medical humanities think differently about suffering?

Chapter Six starts to introduce different ways of thinking about suffering through the notion of pilgrimages. Walking with suffering means the art of connecting up what has been severed through biographical and epistemological breaks. Romantic expressivism sources of self engage with ethical and moral anguish in order to go beyond the fusion of self and role in an instrumentalist sense. Sociological perspectives on self are debated as ultimately contributing to the depersonalisation that seems to run through an instrumentalist self. Colonialist practices of the self and the Black Anthropocene are compared through symbiotic relations between capitalism, race and trauma. A pedagogy of suffering is introduced.