Art’s practices and histories are reshaping conversations at the heart of today’s critical medical humanities.
Art and the Critical Medical Humanities is a new volume bringing together artists and scholars who challenge earlier instrumental views of art, opening new space to confront questions of race, gender, sexuality, disability, care, and clinical knowledge. With contributions spanning centuries and continents, it stands as a landmark resource for those working across medical humanities and art‑aligned fields.
In this conversation, volume editors Fiona Johnstone (FJ), Allison Morehead (AM) and Imogen Wiltshire (IW) reflect on what they have learnt in the process of developing the volume, and the new conversations and directions in scholarship that they hope it will provoke.
What excites you most about the publication of Art and the Critical Medical Humanities?
FJ: This book is the first major publication to explicitly treat art as a method of critical thinking that produces new knowledge about health and medicine. It moves beyond familiar frameworks – art as pedagogy, therapy, or communication – to show how art methods can function as critical tools for interdisciplinary health research.
AM: Many exceptional artists, art historians, and art writers engage deeply with health, yet their work hasn’t always been included in critical medical humanities conversations. I’m thrilled that they’ve contributed here, collectively demonstrating the importance of art to the medical and health humanities.
IW: It’s exciting to see the realisation of the book’s format. We opened up the traditional edited volume structure to include shorter “object stories” centred on single artworks and dialogic texts where authors discuss a theme or concept together. This multivocal structure brings diverse disciplinary, national, and historical perspectives into conversation.
The essays grew out of your seminar series Confabulations (2021–2023). How did the term ‘confabulations’ shape the book?
IW: In developing the series, we were drawn to creative boundary-crossing – working across different times, places, and disciplinary assumptions. “Confabulations,” as John Berger uses it, describes writing as a translation of embodied experience into language, something like giving experience a voice.
AM: The word also has a psychiatric meaning: the imagination filling gaps in memory, creating narratives that feel true even if fabricated. That slippage, that imaginative reconstruction, resonated with what we hoped the series would explore.
IW: The term acknowledges the difficulty of translating bodily experience into language, and the fractures in individual and collective memory – especially memory shaped by professional or disciplinary practices.
AM: It also gestures toward Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” which reworks historical narratives to unsettle authorised perspectives. That methodological openness was important to us.
FJ: From the outset, we hoped to encourage imaginative, collaborative working methods, while acknowledging the colonial structures within art history and the cultural and racial biases that shape medical humanities. The title Confabulations signalled these commitments: crossing boundaries, critically reflecting on memory and narrative, and reimagining disciplinary assumptions.
With more than 40 contributors across continents, covering work from the sixteenth century to today, how does the book set the agenda for the visual medical humanities? What new directions or questions do you hope it provokes?
FJ: I hope the book encourages more explicitly collaborative and transformative work in the visual medical humanities. It speaks to two audiences: interdisciplinary health researchers who aren’t yet engaging with art, and artists and art historians who may not see their skills as central to interdisciplinary health research. I’d like both groups to recognise the potential of working together.
IW: The book insists on the historical sitting alongside the contemporary. This remains crucial for future medical humanities research – understanding how concepts of health take shape, acquire authority, and exert power. The chapters show how art can reinforce or unsettle medical categories and norms, revealing the instability of key concepts.
AM: We were also keenly aware that artists – especially marginalised and racialised artists – often feel excluded or instrumentalised in academic research. While contributors who identify as Black, Brown, Indigenous, and disabled are central to the volume, gaps remain. For example, trans healthcare experiences are still underrepresented. The work of addressing structural inequities in art, art history, and medical humanities is ongoing.
IW: Several chapters point towards future directions in critical studies of art therapy. Therapeutic art practice has been marginalised in both art history and medical humanities. The section “Rethinking art and therapy” historicises these practices, interrogates their assumptions, and refigures relationships between art and psychiatry.
FJ: As visual medical humanities develops, I want to see it move away from restrictive monodisciplinary frameworks and embrace the experimental, interdisciplinary ethos of critical medical humanities. I’m proud that the book foregrounds this transformative potential.
The book is relevant to readers beyond academia. What conversations do you hope it might spark in artistic, curatorial, or healthcare settings?
AM: Working on Lifeblood – Edvard Munch while editing the volume made me think deeply about curatorial practice as a site of health humanities engagement. In summer 2026, the Berlin Medical History Museum of the Charité will host an exhibition on “Horizontality,” guest curated by Nora Heidorn in partnership with the museum’s director Monika Ankele, both of whose work appears in our volume – they met at our workshop! They are also collaborating with artist and curator María Morata, another contributor. Meanwhile, Tania Sheehan, who wrote the afterword, is curating an exhibition on Jacob Lawrence’s Hospital series. Fiona and I are also developing a new multi‑institutional curatorial project, “Curating Cultural Heritage for the Medical and Health Humanities,” partnering with health care museums.
IW: The breadth of materials and methods in the book should appeal across disciplines and to healthcare settings. Key themes – lived experience, care, reproduction, medical imaging, horizontality – are relevant to many fields of practice. The “object stories” offer accessible entry points for readers who don’t usually work with visual material and will be useful teaching resources for a range of courses.
FJ: The book is Open Access, reflecting our commitment to knowledge-exchange. We didn’t want this work locked behind a paywall. Open Access makes it accessible not only to scholars, artists, and curators, but also to people with long-term health conditions who are often excluded from academic spaces.
AM: We also want to highlight forthcoming projects connected to the volume. Edited collections such as Borderline Bodies in Art and Visual Culture and Sick Jokes: Visual Histories of Humour, Health, and the Body are due later this year, and some contributors are editing a special topic on the visual medical humanities for the BMJ.
What have you learned from working on this collection? How will it inform what you do next?
IW: I’ve learned an enormous amount from the volume and the online series that preceded it. As an art historian interested in the limits and margins of the discipline, working with Allison, Fiona, and our contributors has expanded my thinking about interdisciplinary approaches to art and health. My ongoing research on art therapy—including my in-progress monograph Art-Making, Therapy and Modernism in Britain and the United States—has been shaped by the questions and perspectives that emerged from this project. More broadly, I’ve deepened my understanding of the social and political contexts of health and the different forms of knowledge that inform wellbeing.
FJ: I might take a break before another edited volume! I’m focusing on finishing my monograph Critical Interlopers: artists as research collaborators in health and medicine, which positions artists as research leaders in interdisciplinary health studies. I’ll continue advocating for visual medical humanities through the Visual & Material Lab, and Allison and I are working together on a Matariki Network project on health and cultural heritage with colleagues at Uppsala University. I’ve learned so much from working with Allison and Imogen, not least about the differences between how medical humanities is practiced in the UK versus Canada (and North America more generally).
AM: In Canada, medical and health humanities have been closely tied to clinical training, which can overshadow other exciting work. Yet we have extraordinary artists, historians, and interdisciplinary researchers already working in ways aligned with critical medical humanities—Ruth Cuthand, Annmarie Adams, Mary Hunter, Suze Berkhout, Colleen Derkatch, and organisations like Tangled Art Gallery and Workman Arts. Working with Imogen and Fiona to bring our contributors together taught me so much about how to collaborate across disciplines, institutions, and national boundaries. I’m eager to apply those lessons to future curatorial work, especially cultural heritage projects that we are developing with institutions including the Canadian Museum of Health Care. I also hope to advance projects on medical patronage and provenance and return to my monograph, Gambling and the Modern Imaginary, which considers art and the medicalisation of gambling.
Art and the Critical Medical Humanities is published by Bloomsbury Academic in the series Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities. It is available Open Access thanks to support from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and the Wellcome Trust.
