Literature and War Medicine

Literature and War Medicine foregrounds armed conflict in cultural histories of health. It argues that health humanities has underexamined war's physical, psychological, and social pathologies, and uses literary analysis to theorize injury, healing, and disability across conflicts from colonial wars to the Global War on Terror.

Literature and War Medicine argues for the centrality of armed conflict in cultural histories of health and medicine. The emerging field of health humanities has, in the main, not engaged substantively with the burgeoning signifying practices that thematize the many pathologies-physical, psychological, and social-engendered by war. Histories of military conflicts and their attendant medical advances have been and will continue to be written, but how can health humanists theorize injury, healing, and disablement by closely reading literary narratives that grapple with these historical moments? How can novels, memoirs, and short stories that represent war medicine-and sustained attention to their formal properties-provide an alternative avenue for bioethical and biopolitical inquiry? Literature and War Medicine appraises contemporary literature representing medicine, illness, and disability amidst the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, WWI, WWII, postcolonial civil wars in Asia and Africa, the Global War on Terror, and the occupation of Palestine.