In 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Science does not know its debt to imagination," words that still ring true in the worlds of health and health care today. The checklists and clinical algorithms of modern medicine leave little space for imagination, and yet we depend on creativity and ingenuity for the advancement of medicine—to diagnose unusual conditions, to innovate treatment, and to make groundbreaking discoveries. We know a great deal about the empirical aspects of medicine, but we know far less about what the medical imagination is, what it does, how it works, or how we might train it.
In The Medical Imagination, Sari Altschuler argues that this was not always so. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doctors understood the imagination to be directly connected to health, intimately involved in healing, and central to medical discovery. In fact, for physicians and other health writers in the early United States, literature provided important forms for crafting, testing, and implementing theories of health. Reading and writing poetry trained judgment, cultivated inventiveness, sharpened observation, and supplied evidence for medical research, while novels and short stories offered new perspectives and sites for experimenting with original medical theories.
Such imaginative experimentation became most visible at moments of crisis or novelty in American medicine, such as the 1790s yellow fever epidemics, the global cholera pandemics, and the discovery of anesthesia, when conventional wisdom and standard practice failed to produce 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 with and alongside observation, experience, and empirical research. In reframing the historical relationship between literature and health, The Medical Imagination provides a usable past for contemporary conversations about the role of the imagination—and the humanities more broadly—in health research and practice today. 在1872年，拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生写道，“科学不知道它的债务想象,”这句话仍然在世界的健康和保健今天听起来真实。现代医学的检查表和临床算法几乎没有留下想象的空间，然而我们依靠创造力和独创性来推动医学的进步ーー诊断不寻常的疾病，创新治疗，并取得突破性的发现。我们对医学的实证方面知之甚多，但我们对医学想象力了解甚少，它是什么，它是如何工作的，或者我们如何训练它，在医学想象力中 sari altschuler 认为这并不总是如此。在18世纪和19世纪，医生认为想象力与健康直接相关，与治疗密切相关，是医学发现的核心。事实上，对于早期美国的医生和其他健康作家来说，文学提供了重要的手工制作，测试和实施健康理论的形式。阅读和写作诗歌培养了判断力、创造力、敏锐的观察力，并为医学研究提供了证据，而小说和短篇小说为原创医学理论的实验提供了新的视角和场所。美国医学，比如18世纪90年代的黄热病流行，全球霍乱大流行，以及麻醉剂的发现，当时传统的智慧和标准的实践，未能为迫切的问题提供令人满意的答案。在整个十八世纪和十九世纪，健康研究和实践依赖于一个更广泛的知识综合体，在这个综合体中，想象力经常与观察、经验和实证研究一起工作。在重新定义文学与健康之间的历史关系时，医学想象力为当代关于想象力(以及更广泛的人文学科)在当今健康研究和实践中的作用的对话提供了一个可用的过去。 基本信息 出版社 : University of Pennsylvania Press (2018年3月20日) 语言 : 英语 精装 : 312页 ISBN-10 : 0812249860 ISBN-13 : 978-0812249866 商品重量 : 635 g 尺寸 : 15.24 x 2.06 x 22.86 cm
占位居中
直播中，去观看