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.
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
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
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
At first, economic and death seem to be an unusual, incompatible, or even unthinkable pair. However, on closer inspection, economic approaches to what is probably the greatest enigma – death – also offer creative potential, because it creates distance and this distance opens up a space for viewing the complex motif of death. Daniel Wisser’s novel Königin der Berge (2018; “Queen of the Mountains”) focuses on a patient suffering from multiple sclerosis who wishes to end his life. Economic aspects of dying, even down to the specifics of payment, line the polyphonic text that understands life as an absurdity and highlights death as the only option. To achieve this, the author resorts to acts of censorship, visible deletions, and fictional elements and creates a multi-perspective view of a society where desired death is still taboo. The TV-series Upload (2020), currently consisting of two seasons, goes one step further and creates a dystopian look (of the 2030s) at the technical possibilities of shaping life after death. The series also examines the extent to which economic backgrounds determine death. Both portrayals of contemporary dying rely on comical, almost darkly humorous, absurd representations that involve the recipient no less in their intensity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anda-Lisa Harmening https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Melitta Breznik has been dealing with dying and death in literature since her first novel. Her other literary publications are also evidence of her engagement with these topics. Her literary approach to mental and somatic illnesses as well as death can be described as a desideratum of her experiences as a doctor. They are also an attempt to come to terms with and reconstruct one’s own family history through autofiction. In her sixth story Mutter. Chronik eines Abschieds (2020; Mother. Chronicle of a Farewell), she addresses the topic of end-of-life care. The protagonist, who is also a doctor and has previously only encountered death from a professional perspective, accepts her terminally ill mother’s wish to care for her in her home until her death. It quickly becomes clear that the demands placed on the protagonist in this palliative care are completely different to those in hospital. This article focuses on Breznik’s literary portrayal of end-of-life care in her most recently published story. It analyses the multi-perspective narrative style and the narrative structure. Topics such as care work, spatial death settings and writing as self-care are also addressed. In addition, the narrative is categorised within Breznik’s oeuvre as a whole. Ultimately, the analysis is intended to contribute to viewing Breznik’s thanatography as a successful attempt to authentically describe the passing of a loved one without omitting unpleasant things, but at the same time respecting the dignity of the deceased.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna-Christina Chatzinikolaou https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Autie-Ethnography and Epistemic Injustice
Based on exemplary autistic ethnographies and discussions about autistic live writing, the article examines the potential of auto-ethnographic research by Autistics in the context of Critical Medical Humanities. A key argument is that autistic ethnographies emerge in an academic context that is characterised by epistemic injustice in the sense of Miranda Fricker which affects autistic people to a great extent. How far autie-ethnographies can represent a possible response to this finding is discussed primarily on the basis of Remi Yergeau's and Monique Botha's autoethnographic works.
Copyright (c) 2024 Céline Kaiser https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"Nevertheless, Suicide Must Not Become a Societal Norm"
Human dignity is a central concept in bioethical and biomedical issues and, as a norm engrained in the German Basic Law (‘Grundgesetz’), plays an important role in the assessment of potential biomedical procedures. The term can already be found in Christian-Jewish-Biblical contexts as well as in Ancient times, where different dimensions of meaning focus on the social position of humans on the one hand and the differentiation of humans from non-human beings on the other, which is justified by Cicero, among others, with the rationality of humans. The philosopher Immanuel Kant also significantly shaped the concept of human dignity in the modern era and the Enlightenment with his moral principle of the Categorical Imperative. To this day, human dignity is generally referred to in positive terms. As a semantically vague high-value word, the term human dignity is used within the analyzed plenary debates of the German Bundestag from 2021-2023 to present one's own position on assisted suicide. In this study, we examine the use of the term human dignity within arguments and conclude that the term is used without further definition in some, but not all cases. Among other things, it is used within topoi (argumentative patterns) that refer to collective knowledge. Different topoi are used in different ways depending on the position on assisted suicide. A closer look at selected individual argumentations according to the Toulmin scheme suggests that the concept of human dignity frequently takes on the role of supporting the rule of reason within the argumentation, thus reinforcing the justification of the thesis by the argument based on socially established concepts (such as laws or religious commandments).
Copyright (c) 2024 Constanze Spieß, Lesley-Ann Kern https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Discursive Practices of Human-Machine Relations in Diabetes Management
Recent post-humanist theories challenge the notion of human superiority and see hu-mans in constant interaction with and dependence on their material and natural environments. Part of these material environments are rapidly developing new technologies, such as AI-supported medical engineering, and biotechnology. They are blurring the lines between the human and the non-human and put anthropocentric thinking up for debate as technology increasingly shapes the way we think about, feel, and speak about the world. This relation of humans with their technological environments is especially striking and essential in medical contexts: Medical diagnoses nowadays can hardly do without technical equipment, mini-robots assist in surgical procedures, organ and limb functions are supported or controlled by machines and their associated algorithms, such as cardiac and brain pacemakers, dialysis or diabetes management. Technologies are radically changing the way medical professionals think about and interact with patients’ bodies; they are also drastically changing the way how people who use the technologies perceive their own bodies and interact with the devices in their daily lives. Engaging with medical technologies therefore has not only health-related but also social and cultural implications.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rita Vallentin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Multimodal Technics of Self-Presentation in Social Media
This paper discusses the multimodal technics of self-presentation of people with depression on Instagram. On Instagram, people share their individual experiences with depression, in order to interact with others, to search for help and to offer help and hope. In the social media, under condition of interactive, networked forms of communication, participants tell their stories about depression. So, this paper investigates the narrative structure of single small stories. Further, it focuses the polylogue stories generated in peer to peer interactions. According to media discourse analysis, the micro analysis highlights specific verbal acts and their interplay with such visual elements as colour and typography.
Copyright (c) 2024 Marina Iakushevich https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Re:visit celebrates its second year of publication and the editors are delighted to unveil an edition predominantly in English. This edition revolves around a thematic exploration of Pain & Compassion, a product of the research project “Patients and Passions: Catholic Views on Pain in Nineteenth-century Austria”. Beyond the thought-provoking focus of the thematic issue, this issue also introduces, for the first time, an open section with three original articles, a report, an interview and a book discussion.
Copyright (c) 2023 Maria Heidegger, Katharina Fürholzer, Julia Pröll, Tine Van Osselaer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In conversation with ... Katharina Sabernig
Katharina Fürholzer and Maria Heidegger in conversation with artist, physician and anthropologist Katharina Sabernig.
Copyright (c) 2023 Katharina Sabernig, Katharina Fürholzer, Maria Heidegger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Potential of the 'Compassionate Gaze' against Epistemic Injustice in the Patient-Physician Relationship
Not only Alok Vaid-Menon criticized the prevailing societal approach to encountering others with comprehension rather than compassion during their visit to the Man Enough podcast – this discrepancy is also frequently discussed in a medical context. One group of people regularly confronted by others' failing attempts at comprehension are those whose gender does not align with their assigned gender at birth or whose presentation does not conform to it. The shift in perspective proposed by Alok Vaid-Menon, from comprehension to compassion, primarily addressed the everyday interactions with trans and gender-nonconforming individuals and went viral on social media shortly after the podcast's release. However, what could such a shift in perspective mean for medical care? How can healthcare professionals and patients benefit from it? Based on the preliminary study of my dissertation project, I have gathered initial insights to address these questions, which I will present in the following and explore further in subsequent project phases.
Copyright (c) 2023 Felix Lene Ihrig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dental Medicine and the Oral in Contemporary German Literature
This paper aims to record and analyse passages relating to dentistry from over 100 works of German-language fiction. The analysis of more than 15,000 extracts and the search terms they contain provide us with differentiated insight into dentistry as a subject of literature and art. From an aesthetic, functional and pathological perspective, and in so many other ways, dentistry as a subdiscipline of medical science as well as the anatomical structures of the oral cavity are reflections of a very special field of expertise. Oral and dental interventions and experiences quite often have an impact on our lives and destinies. As a consequence, our teeth, and the oral sphere in general, carry meaning within society that goes far beyond the function of just chewing food. The image of the dental profession and the potential of oral power and strength have always been used in art and literature as a vehicle of transference and literarisation. The obsession with our teeth and oral cavities is a physical and psychological reflection of an evolutionary achievement that has taken on a special identity as part of the cultural evolution of our species. Within the connection between healing and behaviour, this identity is multifaceted and symbolises a variety of meanings, feelings and human traits. In this context, the basic dataset that underlies the scientific analysis of the topic consists of an individual corpus of contemporary literary fiction with citations of themes relating to both dentistry and the extended oral dimension. Using a software specifically designed to search for and record terms relating to both dentistry and the oral cavity in works of literary fiction as well as a classification developed for the purpose of manually coding the citations and search terms, the paper attempts to position the results of the analysis in terms of their extended meaningfulness and the valuation of literature within the paradigm of dentistry and the oral sphere in human existence.
Copyright (c) 2023 Frederic Boettel, Maurice Breit, Kurt W. Alt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Scholars working on Catholic conceptions of pain have primarily emphasized that pain is meaningful according to Catholic teachings. Pain and ailments can be salutary or soul-cleansing illness and injury have meaning; and physical and emotional suffering could be God-given and an opportunity for the soul to grow. Rather than focusing on the individual benefits to be gained through suffering, this article focuses on the intersubjective aspect of Catholic conceptions of pain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Analysing the shared pain model in Catholicism, we show that this social aspect went beyond merely communicating about and perceiving pain: it also included suffering on behalf of others. We explore three case studies of apparent vicarious suffering, focusing on women bearing the wounds of Christ: Walburga Zentner, Marie Jalhay-Munzbach and Therese Neumann. In doing so, we gain a more nuanced understanding of what that shared pain model entailed. More specifically, we will see that this notion of suffering ‘on behalf of others’ not only concerned the latter’s spiritual well-being, with the sufferer atoning for the sins of others. It could also refer to their physical well-being, where the suffering was seen as a means to alleviate the pain of others, with the mystic becoming the substitute for someone else – entailing a transfer of pain. Thus, instead of studying the efforts these women were thought to be making for society as a whole as new Christs, we explore the more intimate social exchange between these women and the people, dead or alive, for whom they suffered.
Copyright (c) 2023 Tine Van Osselaer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0