Art and the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Fiona Johnstone, Allison Morehead and Imogen Wiltshire, will be published in late 2025 by Bloomsbury in their series ‘Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities’.
Art and the Critical Medical Humanities grew out of the two-year international online seminar series Confabulations: art practice, art history, critical medical humanities, which ran from 2021-2023. A book workshop ‘Art and the Critical Medical Humanities’ took place in June 2024; the Royal College of Art in London kindly offered space and hospitality, and funding from the Discovery Research Platform made it possible to offer travel bursaries for participants.
This agenda-setting edited volume makes a forceful case for the contribution that art – its practices and its histories – can make to debates and developments in critical medical humanities today.
Whilst medical humanities previously emphasised an instrumental attitude towards art and art-making, recent work has opened up a dynamic space in which art can critically and imaginatively operate. With urgent attention paid to constructions of race, gender, class, sexuality and disability, the artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields represented within this volume address new and pressing questions about structures and experiences of health, medical knowledge, care, therapy, and clinical research and education. With more than 40 contributors from a range of countries including the UK, Canada, the United States, Australia, China, Spain, and Germany, this landmark and multi-format collection addresses artworks from the sixteenth century to the present day, serving as a key reference point for researchers, practitioners, and educators working in medical humanities and art-aligned fields alike.
Cover image: detail from Ruth Cuthand, Surviving: COVID-19, 2020. Glass beads, backing and thread, vinyl lettering on glass. Collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery. With thanks to Ruth Cuthand.
