Re:visit. Humanities & Medicine in Dialogue
Re:visit. Humanities & Medicine in Dialogue is an open-access journal published online. Its principal aims are twofold: firstly, to illuminate existing interfaces between medicine and the humanities from a comprehensive array of cultural perspectives; and secondly, to build a platform for newly emerging fields of interdisciplinary research and thought. By creating an open dialogue, Re:visit strives to prevent the humanities from being ‘medicalized’ in the sense of being reduced to a mere facilitator of competencies for medical staff; next to that, the journal seeks to undermine the risk that an inadequate notion of being superior may cause the humanities and cultural sciences to ‘discipline’ medicine. Instead of tying medicine and the humanities to specific role expectations, Re:visit, which publishes articles in English and German, thus understands itself as the first journal in the German-speaking research community that focuses on the manifold possibilities emerging from the dialogue between medicine and the humanities, both with respect to its potentials and synergies and its risks and side effects.
*]:pointer-events-auto scroll-mt-[calc(var(--header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]" dir="auto" tabindex="-1" data-turn-id="3557a686-f158-4ec8-9b6b-0a434624c3f3" data-testid="conversation-turn-16" data-scroll-anchor="true" data-turn="assistant"> This report examines the challenges of palliative care for terminal neurological diseases, particularly high-grade brain tumors such as glioblastoma, where progressive cognitive and motor decline can lead to isolation, disrupted communication, and loss of identity. It argues that while standard palliative approaches provide essential symptom management, they often inadequately address patients’ needs for meaning, agency, and legacy at the end of life. The report therefore explores expressive, non-pharmacological interventions and focuses on shodō (Japanese brush-and-ink calligraphy) as a culturally grounded, multisensory practice that combines motor activity, attentional focus, aesthetic intention, and meditative discipline rooted in Zen traditions. Drawing on clinical observation and interdisciplinary research from Japan, the UK, and the US, it evaluates the emotional and cognitive potential of brushwork for patients with declining speech or autonomy, reviews emerging clinical outcomes, and discusses cross-cultural, ethical, and implementation considerations. The report concludes by recommending a more inclusive model of palliative healing that attends to both neurological deterioration and the patient’s search for expression and dignity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Saivikram Madireddy, Hibiki Yamazaki, Masayuki Ueda, Masashi Hamada, Francesco Panto, Kana Kaburagi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Premio Strega 2025: Inspired Lunacy, Madhouses, Genetics, and Trauma
*]:pointer-events-auto scroll-mt-[calc(var(--header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]" dir="auto" tabindex="-1" data-turn-id="c4674f30-8f6e-46d1-8d50-d185c1b3d844" data-testid="conversation-turn-14" data-scroll-anchor="true" data-turn="assistant"> This report outlines the history and cultural role of the Premio Strega, founded in 1947 by Maria and Goffredo Bellonci and sponsored by Guido Alberti, and highlights its evolution from the original Amici della domenica jury to a broader voting body that includes literary circles, schools, and cultural institutions. It situates the prize within Italy’s literary canon by noting past laureates and reports on the 2025 edition, won by Andrea Bajani for L’anniversario (also recipient of the Premio Strega Giovani). Focusing on the 2025 shortlist, the report examines the striking prominence of mental health as a shared theme across several competing novels, interpreting this visibility as a sign of growing public interest in discussing mental health beyond strictly medical contexts despite persistent stigma in Italy. Following a brief contextual overview of mental health in Italy, the analysis traces key motifs and approaches across the shortlisted works, concentrating on those novels in which mental health is central.
Copyright (c) 2025 Evelyn Ferrari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Petra Fuchs was born in 1958 in Herten (North Rhine–Westphalia). Since early childhood, she has had a physical disability as a result of polio and uses a wheelchair. After completing teacher training in German, history, and education at Bielefeld University, she moved to Berlin, where in the mid-1980s she co-founded the theatre group Die erste Hilfe with friends; the group performed original productions on disability in several cities. In 1989, together with Rita Brucker (1960–2011), she founded the Fuchs–Brucker film production company and produced provocative Super 8 feature films that critically explored the lived realities of disabled people, especially disabled women, and received international attention. To secure her livelihood, she began working in 1987 at a residential care facility in Hamburg for girls and boys with disabilities, where she reconstructed the biography of the institution’s founder, Hilde Wulff (1898–1972). She continued this historical work in a doctoral dissertation at the Technical University of Berlin, completed in 1999 and later published in two monographs. From 2000 to 2013, she worked as a research associate at the Institute for the History of Medicine at Freie Universität Berlin/Charité on DFG-funded projects on patient history and Nazi medical crimes. This was followed by leadership and teaching positions, including at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin and the University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz. Since May 2022, she has been retired and has served as a co-editor of the Journal of Disability Studies / ZDS Journal of Disability Studies.
Copyright (c) 2025 Petra Fuchs, Lisa Pfahl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article presents the design and pedagogical rationale of Caring with the Humanities, a short course aimed at integrating humanities into psychiatric training. Grounded in philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, the course addresses four key axes: the conceptual foundations of psychiatric diagnoses, the caregiver-patient relationship, the ethical and power dimensions of clinical encounters, and the potential iatrogenic effects of psychiatric institutions. Drawing on thinkers such as Foucault, Goffman, Becker, and Hacking, the curriculum promotes epistemological decentring and reflective practice. It follows the FAIR pedagogical principles (Feedback, Activity, Individualisation, Relevance) and includes participatory modules, such as a diagnostic simulation to highlight interpretive divergences and the constructed nature of psychiatric categories. Through mixed-methods evaluation, including follow-up after three months, the course aims to cultivate humility, critical thinking, and culturally sensitive care. In doing so, it argues that the humanities are not a luxury but an essential dimension of good psychiatric practice.
Copyright (c) 2025 Steve Vilhem https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Oral History and Cultural Embeddedness: Narratives Between Medicine and Culture
This article examines oral history in the context of the cultural specificity of medical discourse. Taking a cultural studies approach and drawing inspiration from methodological approaches in the medical humanities, it analyses how oral narratives about experiences of illness and healing are culturally shaped and contribute to the construction of medical knowledge. The focus is on the question of how cultural, historical and social conditions influence not only individual narratives, but also the reception and interpretation of medical terms and concepts. Selected case studies are used to show how oral history can help to reveal the historicity and cultural dependence of medical discourse and how these narratives invite critical reflection on normative knowledge structures in medicine. The article highlights the relevance of oral traditions for a transcultural examination of health and illness.
Copyright (c) 2025 Felicitas Söhner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Photographs of Patients in Colonial Cameroon: Humanitarian Need for Aid or Invectivity?
In the early 20th century, colonial photography emerged not only as a documentary tool but also as an instrument of visual power, shaping narratives about colonised peoples in Africa. In the context of German colonial rule in Cameroon (1884-1918), photographic representations of the indigenous population, particularly images depicting sick and pathologised bodies, served complex and often conflicting purposes. The article examines individuals from colonial Cameroon, interrogating the underlying intentions and effects of these images. Through a critical image analysis, this study seeks to uncover the ideological frameworks and power structures embedded within these portrayals. The corpus for analysis is drawn from ethnographic collections, including the photographic work of the Austrian ethnographic collectors Rudolf and Helene Oldenburg, the German colonial figure Günter Tessmann, and the lesser-known doctor Felix Mohn, who operated in Cameroon during the colonial period. The selected photographs depict individuals with visible signs of disease, deformity, or physical suffering, often captured in sided and frontal poses or arranged against neutral backgrounds, as per the conventions of scientific imagery of the time. These images are read alongside their original captions and associated textual annotations providing a layered understanding of their context and intended reception. In conjunction with ‘Invectivity Studies’, which are characterised by cultural and social sciences, ‘disability studies’, and historical image research, the photographs can be assigned to the category of ‘humanitarian photography’. The latter approach is intended to refer to the entire historical field of the interpretation, use and function of images in a colonialist-ethnological context, which served precisely to generate support for others who were perceived as being in need of help for various reasons. Colonial image archives on the subject of illness raise questions of a general ethical nature (human dignity) as well as the protection of victims and personal rights.
Copyright (c) 2025 Romuald Valentin Nkouda Sopgui https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
As an acute focal-neurological deficit, a stroke has since antiquity been a disease that in many cases profoundly disrupts a person’s physical and cognitive constitution and has a lasting effect on those affected even after the immediate stroke. While strokes have nowadays moved to the centre of medical examination, the disease and its aesthetic treatment have received surprisingly little attention in literary studies. This essay will therefore attempt to analyse the narrativization of stroke in German-speaking literature in the 19th and early 20th century. Against the backdrop of an extensive corpus of texts, basic characteristics of the literary descriptions of strokes are outlined, before it is shown in two in-depth readings (Wilhelm Raabe: Der Hungerpastor, Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks) that strokes have specific inherent characteristics (suddenness of the illness; aphasic sequelae) which counteract efforts to narrate them in literary form and which therefore affect their representation in narrative texts. The article concludes with a brief anticipation of three further research questions (differentiated diachronic development of stroke narrativization; literary gender index; representations of strokes in poetry and drama from a genre-poetological point of view), which could expand the literary analysis of strokes in a productive way.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nicolas Reuter https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This year’s open issue of Re:visit once again demonstrates the thematic, source-based, and methodological richness of the Medical Humanities, as well as the diversity of the disciplines involved—a heterogeneity that is productively challenging and invites reflection on the field’s distinctive characteristics, while also encouraging the fruitful engagement of points of friction and overlap with adjacent fields. The seven original contributions are situated in comparative literature, linguistics, oral history research, and psychiatry; the sources range from literary texts (including literary self-narratives) and oral illness narratives to medical textbooks and colonial medical photography. Accordingly, the methodological scope is broad, extending from close reading and image analysis within the framework of invectivity studies to pedagogical and didactic reflections on the role of the Medical Humanities in teaching.
Copyright (c) 2025 Katharina Fürholzer, Maria Heidegger, Julia Pröll https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Elsa Romfeld is a philosopher of medicine and philosophical anthropologist. Since 2008, she has been teaching and conducting research in the Department of History, Theory, and Ethics of Medicine at the University Medical Center Mannheim. Her central concern is the art of living and dying – a subject she has explored for over 30 years through numerous publications and projects that span multimedia and transdisciplinary approaches. A trained Germanist as well, she considers language both a vital medium and a research object that deserves greater attention. Among other things, she addresses the question of how illness and death can be expressed – for instance, within the working group “Language and Ethics” of the Academy for Ethics in Medicine, which she coordinates together with Katharina Fürholzer. We spoke with Elsa Romfeld about Café SensenMAnn – Mannheim’s first and only Death Café, which she founded in 2018 – and about the challenges and possibilities of engaging (pro)actively with the “(un)speakability of death.” The conversation was conducted by Katharina Fürholzer, Junior Professor of Interdisciplinarity Studies, and Marcella Fassio, Postdoctoral Researcher in Modern German Literature.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elsa Romfeld, Katharina Fürholzer, Marcella Fassio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Assisted Lab – On the Cultural Dimension of Assisted Dying
Since the turn of the millennium, societal and political debates on assisted dying have gained momentum worldwide. Numerous countries have since legalized assisted suicide and/or euthanasia or initiated political discussions on the topic. At the same time, there has been a growing artistic engagement with the subject. Against this backdrop, the question arises as to what influence literary, cinematic, or theatrical works exert on public opinion and legislative processes concerning assisted dying – and to what extent they themselves are shaped by the cultural, legal, and political contexts in which they emerge. This is the focus of Assisted Lab, an ERC selected SERI financed interdisciplinary research project at the University of St. Gallen, which explores the often-overlooked interconnections between law, medicine, and the arts in the context of assisted dying. This report provides insight into the project’s inception and development, highlights previous findings and activities, and outlines future research questions and challenges.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna M. Elsner, Marc Keller https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This year’s special issue, titled The (Un)Speakability of Death: Contemporary Literarisations and Visualisations of Dying, co-edited by Katharina Fürholzer and Marcella Fassio, explores how literature and film engage with death as a phenomenon that is both anthropologically fundamental and linguistically elusive. At its core lies the tension between what can and cannot be expressed, between representation and absence— a tension that is made aesthetically productive. Through four original articles, two conversations, and one report, the issue examines how fictional and factual texts, as well as various genres, imagine spaces of experience and employ media strategies to render liminal phenomena such as dying visible. Death is thus not conceived as a finite experience, but as a discursively charged void that calls for images where language reaches its limits. Cover image: Egon Schiele Withering Sunflower
Copyright (c) 2025 Katharina Fürholzer, Maria Heidegger, Julia Pröll, Marcella Fassio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Manuel Stetter has held the Chair of Practical Theology at the University of Rostock since 2022, where he also serves as university preacher. Prior to this role, he studied and earned his doctorate at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Tübingen, completing his dissertation The Sermon as a Practice of Transformation. A Contribution to the Foundations of Homiletics (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018) in 2016. In 2022, he completed his habilitation, also in Tübingen; its findings are published in the monograph The Constitution of the Dead. A Religious Ethnography of Funeral Practice (Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2024). Alongside his academic work in research and teaching, Manuel Stetter also served as a vicar for two and a half years. The engagement with death shapes all areas of his work—and how exactly, and what role the question of the (un)speakability of death plays in this, is the subject of the following interview. The conversation with Manuel Stetter was conducted by Katharina Fürholzer, Junior Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies (Koblenz).
Copyright (c) 2025 Manuel Stetter, Katharina Fürholzer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Concept of Symptoms in Textbooks of Classical Homeopathy and Internal Medicine – A Linguistic Contribution to the Medical Humanities
Much of the polarised debate on homeopathy centres on the clinical proof of evidence. Conceptual differences and their influence on medical practice are not present in the public discourse. This makes a productive discussion difficult. This linguistic study focusses on the symptom as a central concept of both healing approaches. Based on an examination of textbooks on internal medicine and classical homeopathy, it is shown that the symptom concepts differ in essential aspects and are verbalised differently. The patterns identified are interpreted against the background of Ludwik Fleck’s theory of thought styles. It is argued that the verbalisation of the symptom concept in accordance with the thought style leads to the development of a professional identity and promotes the consolidation of one's own thought collective. Patterns of language use that do not correspond to the own thought style, on the other hand, lead to irritation and misunderstanding. As a result, the different conceptualisation of symptom drives the polarisation of the discourse. The study aims to identify key differences and typical linguistic patterns. It represents a linguistic contribution to the field of medical humanities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pavla Schäfer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
With three original contributions, a report, and an interview, this year's open section invites further engagement with the complex field of the Medical Humanities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Katharina Fürholzer, Julia Pröll, Maria Heidegger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The experience of illness, as narrated by those who suffer from it, can provide significant insight for medical and health professionals, helping them to understand what their patient is going through, from a psychological and existential point of view. These narratives can also help to bridge the distance between science and experience, and to heal the gap that divides the sick person from the rest of society. The work that Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico have done with their performance La cura (The cure) – started when he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2012 – takes this kind of narrative and selfreflexive experience even further, in order to explore the relationship between culture, technology and biology, with the aim of redefining the meaning of cure (and, consequently, of illness and health) in a collective and inclusive way. La cura can thus be seen as a piece of work that, by belonging to the Medical Humanities, can also take a step forward in building a theoretical and practical dialogue between different disciplines in order to respond to the challenges of our digital (and biotechnological) society.
Copyright (c) 2024 Roberto Laghi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In conversation with Gabriele Werner-Felmayer, the social anthropologist and gender researcher Veronika Siegl (Vienna) provides insight into her postdoctoral project, in which she examines issues of inequality and self-determination in reproductive medicine. Siegl explains how the controversial practice of commercial surrogacy can be understood as a form of "ethical labor." The conversation is based on Siegl's 2023 published monograph Intimate Strangers (Cornell UP).
Copyright (c) 2024 Veronika Siegl, Gabriele Werner-Felmayer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In recent times, especially in connection with multiple crises, reading as a coping strategy seems to have gained importance. Firstly, this article introduces the theoretical concepts of ‘Lebenswissen’ in literature (Ette) and ‘eudaimonia’ (Moores/Nünning and Nünning). Like in bibliotherapy, these concepts suppose that literature contains ‘knowledge of/for life’ and that the reception of literature can have positive effects on readers. Secondly, three prose texts from different times and cultural settings are analysed in respect to how they depict ‘literature within literature’, that is, fictional reading acts and their effects: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817), Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle (The Royal Game, 1942) and Murakami Haruki’s Nemuri (Sleep, 1989). In the three texts, a diversity of literature is read, ranging from solitary reading to vivid discussions and from poetry to a chess book. No unequivocal effects can be identified concerning results and effects, but they are rather ambiguous, possibly inviting readers to deeper reflections.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kathrin Neis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article explores the methodological challenges of approaching the literary analysis of autobiographical texts written by psychiatrized individuals, applying mad studies. Two main aspects are addressed, along with their close relationship: language and representativity. Mental health culture promotes a generalized discourse on how to speak about and frame madness, heavily influenced by the hegemonic discourse of psy disciplines. This paper also highlights the difficulties in representing madness outside these hegemonic frameworks of meaning and discusses the need to re-semanticize madness in order to re-subjectivize it. Finally, some linguistic and representational strategies are proposed, drawn from first-person accounts, which can serve as counter-examples to the epistemological framework assumed in Western science: narrativity itself, the use of collective language, the reappropriation of terms, and the creation of alternative concepts to medical-psychiatric knowledge.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sara R. Gallardo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Despite the generally low status of narratives in mainstream medical practice, it is more widespread than one might think, for example in doctor-patient communication and medical case histories. Furthermore, the usage of new media in medical training and public communication has called for a reconsideration of the value of narratives. Against this background, the present article explores doctors’ and other medical professionals’ storytelling practices in the context of weblogs and podcasts. The examples show that narratives can be employed for a range of reasons, including making the medical profession more accessible but also as an indirect means of criticizing bureaucratic processes. All the examples show that the narratives aim at involving the respective audiences and therefore often show a great degree of creativity and unexpected complexity.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jarmila Mildorf https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Covid-19 pandemic continuously affects people around the world, exposing the already existing social interconnectedness and economic interdependencies of our times. Revisiting pandemic fiction, as well as crises narratives in literature and other cultural productions in general, has suddenly become a coping strategy to counteract the effects of physical distancing, but in particular the experiences of lockdowns. Interestingly, since the early stages of the pandemic in the Western world in spring 2020, numerous artists have not only dissected the reality of confinement across diverse genres but more so provided the public with uplifting content in various audiovisual formats – such as short films, web series, and music videos. Although anglophone music videos are more broadly known, many culture specific uplifting narratives emerged also in Romance languages. Research results from psychology, social sciences and musicology all suggest that in times of crises listening to music, watching music videos and music-making have great potential as coping strategies and tools for mood regulation, significantly contributing to well-being. In this article, we analyze from an interdisciplinary cultural, film, and media studies perspective how three music videos in Romance languages (No tengas miedo by El Canijo de Jerez, Ya pasará by Carlos Rivera, and Andrà tutto bene by Jack Savoretti) encode the uplifting storytelling, portraying the human need for connection, on a narratological macro (fictional arc) and micro level (textual and audiovisual cues). Across national, cultural, and linguistic borders, these Corona Fictions demonstrate how fragile our social fabric is while, at the same time, strengthening the feeling of solidarity, togetherness/ unity, and cohesion in their representations and approach to the Covid-19 pandemic. With this contribution, we intend to enrich the existing research from the intersections of psychology, social sciences and musicology with a specific cultural and media studies perspective beyond cultural products in English.
Copyright (c) 2024 Julia Obermayr, Elisabeth Hobisch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
After completing her master’s degree in German Studies and History at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, and earning her doctorate in German Linguistics (Joint Ph.D. Greifswald and Brno), Dr. Pavla Schäfer initially worked at the University of Greifswald (2012–2019), followed by a position in German Linguistics at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (2019–2020). After her parental leave, Dr. Schäfer returned to Greifswald. Since 2022, she has been employed as a research associate and habilitation candidate at the Institute of German Philology, where she also leads the Greifswald Network for Medical Humanities. Her current research focuses on linguistic trust studies and medical communication, which also ties into her habilitation project funded by the DFG, titled "Textbooks and Thought Styles." In this project, she examines patterns of language use in textbooks on internal medicine and homeopathy from a linguistic perspective. As part of the thematic issue on medicine and media discourses, Pavla Schäfer outlines the development, current state, and future visions of the Greifswald Network for Medical Humanities. The interview was conducted by linguist Dr. Marina Iakushevich, currently a research associate at the Greifswald Department of German Linguistics, co-director of the Linguistics and Medicine Network, and guest editor of the thematic issue.
Copyright (c) 2024 Pavla Schäfer, Marina Iakushevich https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Arno Görgen is a cultural historian. At the Bern University of the Arts, he is the co-lead of the SNSF Sinergia project "Confoederatio Ludens: Swiss History of Games, Play, and Game Design 1968–2000." His research focuses on health and medicine, the medicalization of digital games, systems theory and intellectual history, as well as the pop-cultural representation of illness. In this context, he published the anthology "Superspreader – Pop Culture and Media Discourses in the Face of the Pandemic" in 2024, together with Tobias Eichinger and Eugen Pfister. The anthology was released as part of the Medical Humanities series by transcript Verlag. Christoph Singer, head of the Research Center for Medical Humanities at the University of Innsbruck, and Arno Görgen discuss this book in the following interview.
Copyright (c) 2024 Arno Görgen, Christoph Singer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From “Objective and very competent!! …Just as a doctor should be!!” to “An insult! Never again and not recommended.”
The subject of this article is the communicative acting in the text type online doctor’s assessments from a linguistic and cultural comparative perspective. On the basis of a primarily qualitative study of 70 German and Spanish (peninsular) examples, insights into the macro- and microstructure of this text type will be provided on the one hand, and the linguistic design of the speech act of evaluation, which is constitutive for the text type, will be examined on the other. Furthermore, the linguistic configuration of the assessment of specific criteria such as competence and professionalism or empathy and friendliness of the staff of the surgery visited will be examined by applying corpus linguistic methods. In this context, insights will also be provided. Into the speech act types in which the evaluative verbal actions are embedded, as well as into the weighting of the respective criteria with additional consideration of further linguistic approaches, e.g. the functional sentence perspective. From a theoretical point of view, the article is thus committed to pragmalinguistic approaches of text linguistics as well as theoretical models such as the linguistic theory of politeness. The primarily qualitative study will be supplemented by occasional quantitative analyses in order to provide insights into the frequency and representativeness of the linguistic phenomena and strategies discussed.
Copyright (c) 2024 Paul Mayr, Hanna Mayr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The third special issue of the journal Re:visit. Humanities & Medicine in Dialog, in collaboration with guest editor Marina Iakushevich, is dedicated to the theme "Medicine in Media / Medicine Digital." In addition to six original articles, we explore this main topic through two interviews and two reports.
Copyright (c) 2024 Katharina Fürholzer, Julia Pröll, Maria Heidegger, Marina Iakushevich https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Long Covid as a Collective Experience: A Photo Essay
Although diseases manifest themselves in individual bodies, they usually have multiple, and often systemic, causes. They do not only affect one’s immediate social environment, but whole cities and nations. The pandemic has demonstrated the extent of these interdependencies: a butterfly effect which makes clear that a virus, animals, humans and the environment cannot be thought of separately. And yet, this collective dimension of sickness and health is often pushed into the background. On various levels, Long Covid shows, just like the pandemic, that illness is a collective experience. The syndrome demonstrates the complexity, multidimensionality and the contradictory nature of the collective dimension of being sick and getting well; what it also demonstrates is that this collectivity can become a springboard for long-term transformation. This essay is one way of mobilizing the experience and knowledge of Long Covid patients to signal that we need to rethink our conceptions of illness and use them as a foundation for building new (health)care infrastructures that can hold us all. Whatever their possible shape, we should start discussing them now.
Copyright (c) 2024 Monika Pietrzak-Franger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Understanding Psychiatric Care in the FRG and GDR
Against the backdrop of far-reaching societal change in the 1960s-1980s, reforms in psychiatry took place in both the FRG and GDR. The process was more pervasive in the FRG, more partial and local in the GDR. There is consensus regarding the existence of interactions between the social systems of society and psychiatry, with a clear impact of scientific, cultural and societal developments on the theory and practice of psychiatry. The nature of German cross-border interactions between society and psychiatry has received little attention. It is not clear whether and how contemporary witness narratives (from the fields of psychiatry and wider society) differ across the inter-German border and what role German-German interactions play in either context. This manuscript argues for an interdisciplinary approach: Qualitative content analysis of witness interviews with people from the fields of psychiatry and (non-psychiatric) society uses oral history methods with the potential to identify emotion-historical aspects. The use of discourse analysis and discourse theory in dealing with oral history transcripts could detect and contextualize power effects and narrative themes. The interdisciplinary use of sociological and historiographical methods aims to strengthen German-German psychiatric history research.
Copyright (c) 2024 Georg Bornemann, Thomas Becker, Holger Steinberg, Robert Feustel, Heiner Fangerau, Sven Speerforck, Felicitas Söhner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Amongst the many invisible illnesses, we can also count endometriosis, a chronic, so far relatively little investigated, but quite widespread condition that statistically affects 1 in 10 women. In order to draw more attention to the disease and to the many women who often spend years experiencing debilitating symptoms and suffering in silence, several awareness campaigns take place every year all over the world, mostly in March, which is the international endometriosis awareness month. On March 20th 2024 the city of Innsbruck (Austria) hosted one of such events with the title “Endometriose im Gespräch” (Eng. “Let’s talk about Endometriosis”). Its three highlights were the screening of the documentary nicht die regel (Eng. “not the rule”; Ranya Schauenstein, 2021), a subsequent roundtable and an art exhibit dedicated to endometriosis, the latter organized and created by the Tyrolean endometriosis self-help group. Medicine and art came thus together, and their encounter gave a significant impetus to a meditation on the potential of an interdisciplinary dialogue in view of a society-encompassing paradigm shift in the perception of endometriosis. The present intervention aims at delving deeper into such considerations, while also providing an insight into the designing of “Endometriose im Gespräch”.
Copyright (c) 2024 Evelyn Ferrari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Michael Haneke’s feature film Love (2012) revolves around the drastic depiction of euthanasia and addresses questions of death, redemption and the ethics behind it. The film deals with topics such as old age, illness and dying, particularly the responsibility and moral dilemma that caregivers face in palliative care. Love addresses these debates in the context of narrative ethics through a continuous external focalization of Anne’s suffering: The film is not focalized through the protagonist Anne’s perception, but through her husband Georges’ whose feelings and struggles while caring for his wife lie at the narrative center of the film. By narrating the course of Anne’s illness and death externally, Love marks death as unstageable on the one hand and offers a commentary on the narratability of suffering and death on the other: The external focalization on the process of dying enables a narrative beyond death necessarily results in a stronger focus on the experience of the caregivers. The subjective experience of death, suffering and dying is thus located beyond representation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alina Boy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"Healthy People Are People Who Just Not Realise How Sick They Are"
Health anxieties play a major role in the hierarchy of today’s anxieties. Medical treatment and advice frequently fuel them more than alleviate them. Jules Romains' theatre play Knock, or the Triumph of Medicine (1923) has lost none of its topicality 100 years on and sheds light on the position of medicine in society between care and help, awareness and health education, and the business, not least with anxieties. Dealing with Knock today helps to expose the intentions of the health industry and to put into perspective the significance of this type of health concept, because health is not an end in itself to which the entire development of society and personality must be subordinated.
Copyright (c) 2024 Stephan Heinrich Nolte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The article demonstrates how David Fuchs’ 2018 novel Bevor wir verschwinden (Before we Disappear) relates the categories of image, education, and the Bildungsroman in such a way that the barely articulable and perceptible aspects of the dying process become visible and thus experienceable. The first-person narrator, a medical student in his final internship in oncology, develops both professional and individual independence through his encounters with his dying ex-boyfriend and the support of the interprofessional hospital team. The reality of dying and the professional and personal growth it triggers are linked to the vanitas motif. Drawing on the thesis of bioethicist Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, this motif is interpreted in its event-like nature, as a potential time for meaningful moments. The combination of thematic and everyday levels leads to a reciprocal interpretation of medical and aesthetic meaningfulness and success.
Copyright (c) 2025 Birgitt Reiß https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0