American Life Writing and the Medical Humanities: Writing Contagion bridges a gap in the market by linking the medical humanities with disability studies. It examines how Americans used life writing to record epidemic disease throughout history.

American Life Writing and the Medical Humanities: Writing Contagion bridges a gap in the market by linking the medical humanities with disability studies. It examines how Americans used life writing to record epidemic disease throughout history.

This book asks a seemingly simple question: How has the creation of new fields such as medical humanities and narrative medicine changed the humanities themselves, and American Studies more specifically? Turning to the genre of life writing, this study sets out to chart spaces in which a dialogue between the humanities and the life sciences can emerge. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, life writing narratives such as Tito Mukhopadhyay's 'Beyond the Silence', Temple Grandin's 'Thinking in Pictures', or Michael J. Fox's 'Lucky Man' show that self-description has often become inseparable from biomedical terminology. Linking life writing narratives to discussions in bioethics and exploring the links between autobiography and brain research, this book sets out to wonder whether the divide between the "two cultures" of the humanities and the life sciences may not itself have become obsolete.

This book examines work in several genres of life writing-autobiography, memoir, case history, autobiographical fiction-focused either on what it means to live with schizophrenia or what it means to understand and 'treat' people who have received that diagnosis.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning book that inspired an Apple Original series from Apple TV+ • A landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina—and the suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning physician and reporter “An amazing tale, as inexorable as a Greek tragedy and as gripping as a whodunit.”—Dallas Morning News After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs. Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink, unspools the mystery, bringing us inside a hospital fighting for its life and into the most charged questions in health care: which patients should be prioritized, and can health care professionals ever be excused for hastening death? Transforming our understanding of human nature in crisis, Five Days at Memorial exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals how ill-prepared we are for large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, Entertainment Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star WINNER: National Book Critics Circle Award, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Ridenhour Book Prize, American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award, National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award

Research Methods in Health Humanities surveys the diverse and unique research methods used by scholars in the growing, transdisciplinary field of health humanities. Appropriate for advanced undergraduates, but rich enough to engage more seasoned students and scholars, this volume is an essential teaching and reference tool for health humanities teachers and scholars. Health humanities is a field committed to social justice and to applying expertise to real world concerns, creating research that translates to participants and communities in meaningful and useful ways. The chapters in this field-defining volume reflect these values by examining the human aspects of health and health care that are critical, reflective, textual, contextual, qualitative, and quantitative. Divided into four sections, the volume demonstrates how to conduct research on texts, contexts, people, and programs. Readers will find research methods from traditional disciplines adapted to health humanities work, such as close reading of diverse texts, archival research, ethnography, interviews, and surveys. The book also features transdisciplinary methods unique to the health humanities, such as health and social justice studies, digital health humanities, and community dialogues. Each chapter provides learning objectives, step-by-step instructions, resources, and exercises, with illustrations of the method provided by the authors' own research. An invaluable tool in learning, curricular development, and research design, this volume provides a grounding in the traditions of the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences for students considering health care careers, but also provides useful tools of inquiry for everyone, as we are all future patients and future caregivers of a loved one.

This book brings together both leading-edge research and practical insights on the first-year experience in higher education. Written by a large team of experts, the text integrates a variety of multidisciplinary approaches and real-life case studies into an effective pedagogical resource for the higher education scholarly audience of both professors and administrators to address the needs of first-year students in higher education. The book includes material authored by 39 professors and professionals from more than 20 universities and higher education organizations from across the USA, Canada, the Philippines, and Germany. This book offers insights for disciplines including business administration and management, communications, counseling, education, law and governance, mental health and psychology, sociology, and others. Scholars and practitioners in a variety of higher education areas can benefit from it in terms of their work in academic success, advising, campus safety, career services, dual enrollment programs, emergency management, mathematics education, service learning, student well-being, technology management, and other areas.

This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by seriously considering the animal presence in texts. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied theoretically informed interdisciplinary perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cut across geographical and period boundaries and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the “animal turn” in the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers fresh perspectives on Posthumanist theory, inviting readers to revisit those criteria that created species’ difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating, and highly relevant topics. Comprising over 15 chapters by a team of international contributors, this book is divided into four parts: Contestation over Species Hierarchy and CategorizationAnimal (Re)constructionsInterspecies RelationalitiesIntersectionality- Animal and Gender This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of Critical Animal Studies and Environmental Studies.

This textbook uses concepts and methods of the humanities to enhance understanding of medicine and health care.

“A surprisingly maximalist portrait of a life.” —New York Times Book Review The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Alternatingly wistful and wry, ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to shape a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments.