Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-wxvwp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T11:45:56.431Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Disease versus Disability: The Medical Humanities and Disability Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Diane Price Herndl
Diane Price Herndl*
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button.

One of the consistent problems i find in the work I do—which is focused on women and the cultural representations of illness—is classification. There was not really a category of “disability studies” when I started this work in the 1980s, and I would have resisted that label even if there had been. Since embracing the field of disability studies, I have wondered about my early resistance to it. At first, I attributed it to my own ableism (and I don't think I am necessarily wrong about this), but as I have continued to work on the issues, I am coming to see it more as a result of a disciplinary divide between the medical humanities and disability studies. My first job teaching literature was in a medical school, and I was early on immersed in the idea of the medical humanities, an idea I am beginning to think is antithetical to disability studies (though not to disability itself). My talk today discusses the source of that divide, the problems I see with it, and suggestions for what we can do about it. I want to examine the two interdisciplinary fields in terms of their disciplinarity, and in the interest of time, I'll use a shortcut to do this; I will compare two relatively recent MLA publications, Teaching Literature and Medicine (2000) and Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002).

Information

Type
Conference on Disability Studies and the University
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 2 , March 2005, pp. 593 - 598
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

References

Works Cited

Bérubé, Michael. “Afterword: If I Should Live So Long.” Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson 337–43.Google Scholar
Cassuto, Leonard. “Oliver Sacks and the Medical Case Narrative.” Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson 118–30.Google Scholar
Donley, Carol, and Buckley, Sheryl. “The Tyranny of the Normal.” Hawkins and McEntyre 163–74.Google Scholar
Donohoe, Martin. “Exploring the Human Condition: Literature and Public Health Issues.” Hawkins and McEntyre 92–104.Google Scholar
Franklin, H. Bruce. “‘Doctor’ Frankenstein and ‘Scientific’ Medicine.” Hawkins and McEntyre 218–25.Google Scholar
Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, eds. Teaching Literature and Medicine. Options for Teaching 16. New York: MLA, 2000.Google Scholar
Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Longmore, Paul K. “Why I Burned My Book” and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Mairs, Nancy. “Sex and Death and the Crippled Body: A Meditation.” Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson 156–70.Google Scholar
Ott, Katherine. Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Price Herndl, Diane. “Style and the Sentimental Gaze in Last of the Mohicans.” Narrative 9 (2001): 259–83.Google Scholar
Snyder, Sharon L., Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rose-marie Garland-Thomson, eds. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: MLA, 2002.Google Scholar