Embodied Books : Experiencing the Health Humanities through Artists’ Books

«We often speak of the body of text, and Darian Goldin Stahl’s excellent and timely book deals with sister-inspired texts of the body. Stahl makes the case, beautifully and powerfully, for the value of artists’ books to open us up (like a laparotomy) to illness experience.»

(Paul Crawford, Professor of Health Humanities, University of Nottingham, UK)

This book investigates how handmade artists’ books excite the senses to communicate lived experiences of illness and disability. The combination of text, image, materials, and form, along with the gesture of turning pages, make artists’ books a powerful source of expressive potential. These works of art not only enable patients to create meaning from their medical experiences, but also invite healthcare learners to an uncensored read of critiques on Western medicine.

Artists’ books are increasingly popular among medical institutions in an age of digital screens because of their intimate handheld, multi-sensory expressions of bodily phenomena that may be difficult or impossible to communicate through words alone. By applying a phenomenological practice of sensing and meaning-making, the author provides step-by-step instructions for creating new artists’ books as part of health humanities pedagogies. In this way, Embodied Books serves as a philosophical and pragmatic example of why and how experiencing artists’ books in healthcare contexts is so important.