The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States

Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote from 1872 still holds true today, emphasizing the importance of imagination in health and health care. While modern medicine relies on checklists and clinical algorithms, it leaves little space for creativity and ingenuity. Sari Altschuler's book, The Medical Imagination, argues that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doctors understood the imagination to be directly connected to health and healing, and central to medical discovery. Reading and writing poetry, novels, and short stories trained judgment, cultivated inventiveness, sharpened observation, and supplied evidence for medical research. Imagination often worked with and alongside observation, experience, and empirical research, providing a usable past for contemporary conversations about the role of the imagination in health research and practice.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 15 February 2022
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Ralph Waldo Emerson's words from 1872 still hold true today in the realms of health and healthcare. While modern medicine's checklists and clinical algorithms leave little room for imagination, we rely on creativity and ingenuity to advance medicine, diagnose unusual conditions, innovate treatment, and make groundbreaking discoveries. While we have a wealth of empirical knowledge in medicine, we know far less about the medical imagination itself. In her book, "The Medical Imagination," Sari Altschuler explores how doctors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries understood the imagination as deeply connected to health, healing, and medical discovery. For physicians and other health writers in the early United States, literature played a crucial role in shaping, testing, and implementing theories of health. Reading and writing poetry honed judgment, fostered inventiveness, enhanced observation, and provided evidence for medical research, while novels and short stories offered fresh perspectives and settings for experimenting with novel medical theories. Such imaginative experimentation became most evident during moments of crisis or novelty in American medicine, such as the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, the global cholera pandemics, and the discovery of anesthesia, when conventional wisdom and standard practice fell short of satisfying answers to pressing questions. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, health research and practice relied on a broader complex of knowing, in which imagination often worked hand in hand with observation, experience, and other forms of knowledge.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780812225204