Cambridge Scholars Publishing Body Talk in the Medical Humanities: Whose Language?

This exciting book draws on the insight and experience of 21 medical practitioners and researchers in the wider field of the medical humanities to ask fundamental questions related to illness, bodily experience, the experience and role of medical and healthcare professionals, and the contribution of language and communication to enable understanding. It opens up a range of conversations, reflections and research to present an innovative approach to the field of body studies, investigating complex questions that are associated with self and body and medical and healthcare professionals who work with bodies that are ill. Areas of pain, disability, vulnerability, life experienced through chronic conditions and the insights of listening to the ill and the dying are examined within the individual contributions. The chapters explore a range of key spaces, gaps and tensions between talk and bodies, from embodied experiences and patient-doctor relationships to negotiating institutional constraints and reading, looking and enacting as methods of improving intersubjective, relational and ethical practices. About the Author Jennifer Patterson is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Greenwich, UK. An interdisciplinary critical theorist, she is the author of a number of peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, including “Refiguring Risk in Medicine and Healthcare: crafting Wild Narratives” in Risk and Regulation at the Interface of Medicine and the Arts. She teaches and supervises nursing and education professionals at the doctoral level, and is currently President of the Association for Medical Humanities and a CAM therapist. Francia Kinchington is an experienced educational consultant with expertise in leading change and development in higher education and schools. Her interests lie in psychology, creativity and education. She is a graduate member of the British Psychological Society and most recently edited Revealing the Inner World of Traumatised Children and Young People: An Attachment-Informed Model for Assessing Emotional Needs and Treatment (2017).