Description
Book SynopsisRead an interview with Karen Thornber. In Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care, Karen Laura Thornber analyzes how narratives from diverse communities globally engage with a broad variety of diseases and other serious health conditions and advocate for empathic, compassionate, and respectful care that facilitates healing and enables wellbeing. The three parts of this book discuss writings from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania that implore societies to shatter the devastating social stigmas which prevent billions from accessing effective care; to increase the availability of quality person-focused healthcare; and to prioritize partnerships that facilitate healing and enable wellbeing for both patients and loved ones. Thornber’s Global Healing remaps the contours of comparative literature, world literature, the medical humanities, and the health humanities. Watch a video interview with Thornber by the Mahindra Humanities Center, part of their conversations on Covid-19. Read an interview with Thornber on Brill's Humanities Matter blog.
Trade Review"At once a vigorous re-framing of Medical Humanities, and a vigorous challenge to World Literature as it is currently defined, Global Healing offers a new geography, a new methodology, and a new archive, connecting the Americas to Asia and Africa, and, through that expanded sphere of analysis, speaking to the world's health crisis with a new urgency and authority." - Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University "All too infrequently a book is published that redirects the inquiries of multiple fields. This is such a book. Global Healing is an extraordinarily huge book not merely in word count but far more so in scope, depth, and vision. Global vision is easy to say but extremely difficult to achieve. Global Healing does so. It is essential reading for those working in Asian studies, African studies, global studies, and especially medical humanities, health humanities, and bioethics." - Jing-Bao Nie, University of Otago "Karen Thornber has written a tour de force. It is difficult to imagine a book more sweeping in its scope and successful in its ambitions. Global Healing is essential reading for health humanists, as well as literary critics, historians, and health professionals who think seriously about the promise of the humanities for health." - Sari Altschuler, Northeastern University, author of The Medical Imagination "Karen Thornber’s Global Healing is a major achievement that will have a critical impact on both the medical humanities and global literary studies. Ranging across traditional boundaries of east and west, north and south, with erudition, clarity, and compassion, Thornber powerfully demonstrates how literature illuminates the most essential elements of the experience of illness, as well as the limits of our medical and social approaches to its alleviation." - Allan M. Brandt, Harvard University, author of The Cigarette Century "Karen Thornber has written the most extraordinary book. It is an account of global literature written from and by those experiencing, caring for, and thinking with pain, suffering and healing. But pride of place goes to works in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Urdu, Arabic, and by writers in Africa, Oceania, Latin America and South Asia about whom even experts in global health and medical humanities will know very little. Counterposing these works with deep and original readings of Sontag, Roth, Coetzee, Fadiman, Gawande, and other well-known Western writers leads to surprising and powerful insights on the human experiences of sickness and care that will convince anyone who needs convincing how essential comparative literature is in the current debates on health care. Reading footnotes that review telling original accounts of human experiences in Korean and what happens to them when translated into Urdu, Chinese and English will upset taken for granted theories and suggest new ones. This is especially true for stigma and leprosy, AIDS, and dementia. But this is not only a book about ideas, but a vade mecum of actions, reactions, reforms, advocacy and policy. A veritable museum of global literatures on what the human experience and meanings of health, suffering and care are that can claim greater comparative cross- cultural validity than anything I have read. An immense and unique achievement!" Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University, author of The Soul of Care
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1Comparative Literature, World Literature, Global Literature 2Literature and Medicine, Medical and Health Humanities 3The Chapters Part 1: Shattering Stigmas Introduction: Exposing Stigmas 1Legacies of Leprosy 1Leprosy, Christianity, Europe 2Imperialism, Segregation, Hawai‘i, Nigeria 3Leprosy and East Asia 4Propagating Prejudices 5Countering Violence 5.1Leprosy Narratives and Hawai‘i 5.2Japanese and Korean Stories of Leprosy 5.3Paradise Reconsidered in Yi Ch’ŏngjun’s Your Paradise 5.4Betrayal and the Urdu Translation of Your Paradise 5.5Leprosaria as Refuge – Ola Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead 2AIDS, National Fear, Literary Production 1HIV/AIDS – The Global Epidemic 2South Africa – Silence, Secrets, Accusations 3Tanzania and Kenya – Denials, Allegations, Vulnerability 4China – Innocence, Guilt, Social Control 5The United States – Indictments, Activism, Understanding 3AIDSStigmas, Fear, Care 1Deterring Advocacy, Activism, and Education 2Deferring Responsibility 3Obstructing Timely Testing and Medical Treatment 4Forestalling Support 5Destroying Landscapes Entr’acte: Confronting the Stigmas of Alzheimer’s Part 2: Humanizing Healthcare Introduction: Person-Focused Care – Advocacy, Respect, Compassion, Empathy, Healing 1Calls for Patient-Centered Care 2Person-Focused Care – Empathy, Cultural Humility, Compassion, Healing 3Challenges to Person-Focused Care 4Narrative Interventions 4Contrasts in Care 1Exposing Disparities 2Asserting Humanity 3Voicing Despair 4Articulating Change 5Speaking For, Not With 1Stories Dismissed 2Stories without Words 3Stories without Memories 4Differences Denied 6 Medically Treating, Not Healing 1Transforming Medicine – Women Physicians and Healing 2Saving without Healing 3Temporarily Curing without Healing 4Accentuating Violence, Impeding Healing 7Interventions in Dying 1Easing Death 1.1On the Right to Decline Death-Prolonging Care 1.2On the Right to Life-Ending Care 2Conundrums of Cure 2.1Sacrifices in Discovering and Developing Cures 2.2The Paradoxical Precariousness of Cure Part 3: Prioritizing Partnerships Introduction: Healing Partnerships 8Promoting Partnerships in Living, Sharing Care 1Integrating Support – Patients, Loved Ones, Health Professionals, Societies 2Truth Telling – Patients, Loved Ones, Health Professionals 3Eschewing Medical Treatment – Patients, Loved Ones 4All about Elephants 9Providing Partnerships in Dying, Easing Death 1Partnerships Interrupted 2Partnerships Criminalized 3Partnerships Redefined Bibliography Index
