Charles Forsdick concludes the Reading Bodies takeover and discusses how this project on historical discourses of illness in European literatures and cultures contributes to rethinking the medical humanities in ways that are simultaneously multilingual, transnational and translational.
As the four contributions to this takeover of The Polyphony make clear, the Reading Bodies project challenges us to think more critically and also more inclusively about the medical humanities. It does this notably by reflecting not only on how the field is framed more broadly, but also by studying how we conceive of its objects of study, by questioning the methodological and even epistemological assumptions with which the field is associated, and by releasing the translational potential of this key area of enquiry for broader debates about policy and practice relating to health and well-being. Reading Bodies – with its analysis of how illness and the body are represented in European literature and culture from the 1870s to the 1960s (and indeed beyond) – is located purposefully in relation to a new medical humanities that is at the same time multilingual, transnational and translational. As such, bringing material from Hispanic studies alongside writing in French, German, Italian and Portuguese, the project operates at a point of multidisciplinary intersection, actively associating the medical humanities with modern languages. In so doing, it insists on how approaches that are monocultural and monolingual risk generating biases and gaps in understanding that have too often been silenced and ignored.
Reading Bodies is, therefore, a significant provocation, employing an approach that is both multilingual and multidisciplinary, and enhancing the medical humanities with insights from a range of fields including modern languages, creative writing, public health and psychology. Its key themes encompass an enhanced understanding of how illness narratives emerge and evolve across literature and other cultural texts, providing significant attention to the gendered representations of both psychological and physical conditions, and an active acknowledgment of cultural legacies and of how these narratives resonate up to the present day. The real originality of the project lies, however, in the commitment to locating these elements in a multilingual and cross-cultural frame, moving away from a more conventional comparatism to propose an approach to medical phenomena that foregrounds their transnational entanglements.
Associating this approach with what they dub the “transcultural medical humanities,” Katharine Murphy and Olivia Glaze propose a purposeful diversification of the field, not only of its objects of analysis, i.e., an attention to “diverse media, including fiction (short stories, novels), journalistic writing, visual artwork, and film as sites of medical knowledge production’” (295), but also, following the example of the “critical medical humanities” (Whitehead and Woods 2016), of its methods and assumptions, including those essential multilingual perspectives discussed above. The project depends on an active decentring, shifting focus away from the now common and still highly necessary recuperation of patient voices towards paying closer attention to the languages and cultures that serve as vehicles for these illness narratives (and the wider processes of storytelling to which they relate). As Murphy and Glaze (2025, 296) conclude on the broader contribution of the project: “A key conceptual thread […] is its contribution to de-centring hitherto dominant cultural and political perspectives, languages, and textual forms.”
In outlining the impact of the project, Murphy and Glaze signal a medical humanities whose work of de-centring is at once critical, multilingual and transcultural. These elements are arguably gathered together in an understanding of the medical humanities that is “translational”, i.e., an approach which “considers cultural and scientific factors as intermingled in the production and transmission of medical knowledge” (Engebretsen et al. 2020: e2). In addition, such an understanding has “the potential to cross-fertilize notions and experiences of biological and socio-cultural contagion in an interdisciplinary way, thus impacting, and by extension changing, not just the scholarly landscape of medical humanities but also medical knowledge, practice, and policy themselves” (Arnaldi et al. 2022: 389).
As Steven Wilson’s (2023) earlier discussion on The Polyphony of “multilingual medical humanities” makes clear, in such a “pluralistic, polysemic” approach, the translational is always already present: “By analysing what new facets or understandings of human experiences of medicine might be revealed by a linguistic, cultural and translational encounter with the native tongues of the world’s majority non-anglophone population, we hold open the tantalising possibility of more comparative work in the medical humanities, in which ‘the other place’ […] is not situated in binary opposition to anglophone perspectives and scholarship, but becomes productively ‘entangled’ with it” (Wilson 2023). As this language-conscious approach makes clear, it is important to stress that such a privileging of the “translational” eschews any alinguistic tendencies that the adoption of the concept in medical contexts has often involved. Instead, it actively foregrounds the intralingual variation inherent in working across sectors and disciplines and the multilingual challenge of navigating between cultures.
In Reading Bodies, translation features literally, with the focus, for instance – as Rocío Rødtjer’s contribution to this takeover makes clear – on the travels and transformations of the body of thought associated with Darwinism in the nineteenth-century Spanish-speaking world. This example – revealing how “Darwinism soon became seen as a dangerous British export that corrupted minds and bodies like a disease” – allows reflection on the connections between translation and metaphors of contagion. In exploring such contexts, however, translation is also deployed – as Rødtjer goes on to explain – to “transgress the Anglocentrism that permeates scholarship in both medical humanities and scientific research,” and to offer methodological alternatives. This approach chimes with Wilson’s (2023) challenge to short-circuit any bias that seems to dictate the need for binaries of comparison always to involve an anglophone pole. It suggests that the medical humanities might, in fact, identify some of the alternative configurations that approaches rooted in modern languages enable, i.e., “might find significant traction in paying close(r) attention to those places and spaces – those border-crossings – where cultures and peoples meet, and where translational encounters give access to other outlooks” (Wilson 2023).
In the introductory text that makes up the first part of this week’s takeover, Katharine Murphy describes how, in this way, the contributors to the broader Reading Bodies project “consider national, transnational and decolonial narratives, thereby foregrounding arguments that deconstruct dominant racialised historiographies of illness.” She crystalizes here the potential of the translational medical humanities to challenge the limitations created by angloparochialism (Wolters 2013; Holmes 2023) in research, i.e., the tendency of anglophone scholars to neglect work on other languages and cultures, which can lead to a limited and even biased view of their discipline. This conceptualization of the field highlights the extent to which, as Anna Wierzbicka notes in her provocative book Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language, “[w]hile English is a language of global significance, it is not a neutral instrument or one that, unlike other languages, carves nature at its joints; and that if this is not recognized, English can at times become a conceptual prison” (2013, 4).
Translational medical humanities is not, however, merely a means of revealing limitations; it also demonstrates how identifying alternatives to anglonormativity – i.e., the assumption that English is the default global language and that English-speaking cultures are the universal standard – forces us to reflect differently not only on our objects of study but also on how those objects are approached. The challenges of “researching multilingually” were demonstrated by Alison Phipps and her team across an AHRC-funded project of that title that ran between 2014 and 2017, and has led to a range of other related initiatives (see Phipps 2019; Holmes, Reynolds and Ganassin 2022). Their work demonstrates how researchers across the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences are increasingly confronted by challenges that are entangled across geopolitical spaces and across multiple languages, meaning that normative (not least anglonormative) research approaches are no longer adequate for analyzing human experience in these complex contexts.
Multilingual methodologies necessitate an openness to alternative epistemologies, and the project celebrated in this current takeover itself “offers decolonial approaches to reading illness from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, including several Hispanic-studies perspectives on the transatlantic circulation of people, ideas, and disease between Europe and the Americas” (Murphy and Glaze 2025, 297). Nicolás Fernández-Medina’s contribution to this takeover demonstrates such a generation of new perspectives by analysing the Spanish avant-garde’s response to the biomedical sciences through the lens of Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s pioneering critical and creative practice. It is in such instances that an initial diversification inherent in multilingual and cross-cultural approaches leans towards the more radical decolonization of research that is the logical outcome of rethinking anglonormativity.
Reading Bodies demonstrates how working multilingually and translationally has implications for all stages of the research process, from the identification of corpus and the elaboration of methods to final decisions about dissemination. One of the ambitions of the project – evident in some of its key outputs, The Burnout Booklet and the creative anthology, Reading Bodies: Burnout, Overload and Resilience, as well as Hannah Berry’s comic on burnout and resilience (a striking example of the graphic form itself as translation zone) – is also to rethink the mechanisms of the translational involved in transforming the findings of research into impact. The project team states a clear ambition in this regard: “by analysing the representations of structural conditions that perpetuate the material realities of illness in cultural texts from the past, we aim to cast light on the ongoing relevance of literary and visual language for contesting health inequalities” (Murphy and Glaze 2025, 296).
As Engebretsen et al. (2020: e2) note, however, one of the limitations of a “translational medicine” approach in the clinical sciences is that it “considers translation as an unproductive, purely technical and communicative process, with the sole aim of carrying the scientific message across the gap between bench and bedside.” In ensuring that methodological considerations complement the project’s reflection on the translation of research to broader audiences, Reading Bodies seeks to restore a sense of the complexity of any translational dynamics, not only in terms of the navigation of different languages, cultures and regimes of knowledge, but also in relation to the communication and application of humanities research. As such, the project poses an additional challenge to any rethinking of the medical humanities.
Olivia Glaze, in her contribution to this takeover, describes the ways in which, in the development of “practical tools designed to inform and influence healthcare policy,” there is a possibility of deploying knowledge of how “different linguistic expressions and cultural frameworks influence the ways people describe symptoms, cope with diagnosis, and engage with medical institutions.” The examples explored in the project not only permit, therefore, the historicization of contemporary phenomena such as burnout, but also – as Glaze goes on to note – seek to provide policymakers “with evidence to design culturally sensitive public health campaigns and interventions.” Such an approach builds on recent learning, notably in the Covid-19 pandemic, when we learnt once again about the role of multilingualism in the generation and circulation of scientific knowledge in the context of a global health crisis. It also highlights the importance of linguistically and culturally sensitive approaches, especially in public health, to the prevention of the spread of disease.
In this context, Reading Bodies stands as an exemplary illustration of the value of research in the humanities in this field. It draws on that multilingual, cross-cultural and translational knowledge only available to researchers capable of operating beyond the comfort zone of English in order to analyse and historicize narratives of disease in a global frame. It then redeploys that approach to think critically and creatively about how the knowledge acquired can be shared, in ways that – to quote Olivia Glaze in this takeover of The Polyphony – “challenge one-size-fits-all models of healthcare delivery, advocating for more tailored approaches that respect and integrate patients’ cultural backgrounds into the healthcare system.”
About the author
Charles Forsdick is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge. A Member of the Academy of Europe, he is also currently Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. Charles is Honorary Professor in the Centre for the Study of International Slavery at the University of Liverpool. He edits or co-edits three series for Liverpool University Press: “Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures,” “World Writing in French: New Archipelagoes” and the “Glissant Translation Project.” He also edits a series for Anthem Press called “Anthem Studies in Travel.” He is Chair of the Advisory Council of the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies. Since 2019, he has been a member of the Conseil scientifique of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage. He sits on a number of journal advisory boards, including Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Australian Journal of French Studies, Irish Journal of French Studies, Journal of Romance Studies, Studies in Travel Writing and Francosphères, and is an Associate Editor of Languages, Society and Policy and CFC Intersections.
References
Arnaldi, Marta, Eivind Engebretsen, and Charles Forsdick. 2022. “Translating COVID-19: From Contagion to Containment.” Journal of Medical Humanities 43 (3): 387–404. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-022-09742-5.
Engebretsen Eivind, Gina Fraas Henrichsen, and John Ødemark. 2020. “Towards a translational medical humanities: introducing the cultural crossings of care.” Medical Humanities 46: e2. https://mh.bmj.com/content/46/2/e2.
Holmes, Martin George. 2023. “Language Learning and Historical Research: the Danger of Anglophone Parochialism.” The Historian 85 (3): 315–336. https://doi.org/10.1080/00182370.2023.2397205.
Holmes, Prue, Judith Reynolds, and Sara Ganassin, eds. 2022. The Politics of Researching Multilingually. Multilingual Matters.
Murphy, Katharine, and Olivia Glaze, eds. 2025. “Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s and Beyond).” Journal of Romance Studies 25 (3): 293–530. https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/jrs/25/3.
Phipps, Alison. 2019. Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate. Multilingual Matters.
Whitehead, Anne, and Angela Woods. 2016. “Introduction.” In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, 1–31. Edinburgh University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2013. Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford University Press.
Wilson, Steven. 2023. “Manifesto for a Multilingual Medical Humanities.” The Polyphony, May 30, 2023. https://thepolyphony.org/2023/05/30/manifesto-multilingual-medhums.
Wolters, Gereon. 2013. “European Humanities in Times of Globalized Parochialism.” Bollettino della Società Filosofica 208: 3–18. https://www.sfi.it/files/download/Bollettini/BOLLETTINO%20208.pdf.
