Megha Manjari Mohanty reviews Art and the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Fiona Johnstone, Allison Morehead, and Imogen Wiltshire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), exploring how the volume positions art as a methodological tool for rethinking medical knowledge and care alongside cultures of illness and health.
The field of critical medical humanities, in the past decade, has worked to distance itself from service-oriented models that cast art and its practices as adjuncts to clinical practice as tools for empathy, communication and humanisation, but rather as constitutive of situated medical knowledge itself and as a generative site for critique (Viney et al, 2015; Whitehead and Woods 2015). Published as a part of the Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities series, Art and the Critical Medical Humanities (2026), edited by Fiona Johnstone, Allison Morehead, and Imogen Wiltshire, makes a compelling intervention in this direction by insisting that art be considered not merely as meditation but as a methodological tool for critical inquiry. Having emerged from the Confabulations series (2021-2023), the volume is a “curatorial” project that brings together artists, historians, art curators, and medical humanities scholars to interrogate the structures through which racism, ableism, and the imperatives of neoliberal productivity shape medical knowledge.
The volume moves beyond the conventional academic format by bringing together three distinct forms of writing: academic essays, dialogues and shorter analytical pieces on specific artworks, spread across six thematic sections. Of these, the entries based on individual artworks stand out in particular, not solely because of their potential as pedagogical resources, as the editors note, but also because they serve as accessible entry points through which readers can see the principles and methodologies of the critical medical humanities in action. Kathleen Pierce’s analysis of Byron Kim’s Synecdoche, for instance, exposes the racial assumptions embedded in dermatological tools such as the Fitzpatrick scale, while Amanda Cachia’s reading of Jesse Darling’s Episemologies (shamed cabinet) demonstrates how cripistemology can challenge the curative logic of biomedical discourse.
Several contributions in the volume offer clear points of convergence between artistic practice and medical humanities inquiry, such as Rebecca Whiteley’s analysis of William Smellie’s obstetric illustration, which demonstrates how visual techniques were used to legitimise the figure of the male midwife in eighteenth century Britain. Others, such as Arya Thampuran’s reading of Wangechi Mutu’s Cervical Hypertrophy, draw on contemporary art to interrogate the racialised histories embedded within gynaecological science and colonial foundations of biomedical knowledge, and Suzannah Biernoff’s chapter on kintsugi uses the Japanese art form to rethink ideas of damage, repair, and embodiment within medical contexts. Vanessa Bartlett’s essay on curating experiences of gut-related illness further demonstrates how artistic and curatorial collaborations can move beyond conventional models of science communication and foreground the embodied expertise of people living with undiagnosed chronic illness. Several contributions similarly explore how artistic practices can reframe bodily experience and care as seen in discussions of Angela Alves’s project REST and Nora Heidorn’s curatorial work Being Horizontal, both of which reassess the cultural and political meanings of rest, vulnerability and horizontality by challenging the valorisation of the upright, productive body. Established forms such as graphic narratives appear across several chapters as an important strategy for challenging medical authorities and institutional frameworks. While Leah Gipson and Katherine Houpt turn to graphic medicine as a viable alternative to the institutionalised field of art therapy, which continues to reinforce white, neoliberal, and ableist hierarchies, Katie Snow, Christine Slobogin, and Laura Cowley examine how caricature and visual humour can destabilise the hierarchies embedded within clinical spaces.
Significant attention is dedicated to exploring how historical structures of slavery, colonialism and medical racism continue to shape contemporary reproductive experiences. Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Gabriella Nelson’s dialogue, for instance, revisits the case of Margaret Garner, who killed her children to protect them from being enslaved, to examine how the historically wrongful pathologization of Black motherhood has contributed to the devaluation of Black birthing bodies, an injustice that continues to manifest in contemporary healthcare disparities, most visibly noted in the disproportionately high maternal mortality rates among Black women. Along similar lines, Jessica Womack’s analysis of Charmaine Watkiss’s Return of the Seed Keeper demonstrates how botanical knowledge used by enslaved women to induce abortions functioned as a form of reproductive resistance within systems of enslavement. By bringing these histories into the conversation, these pieces demonstrate how the critical medical humanities can reveal racialised foundations of contemporary reproductive medicine while also recovering alternative narratives of agency, care, and resistance.
The volume introduces a range of methodological innovations that expand the critical medical humanities’ toolkit. The most significant in this regard is Gemma Blackshaw and Alice Butler’s “Flight as Method”, which takes the form of an epistolary exchange centred on the lives of two historical “sick women”, Cookie Mueller and Liliana Amon (240). Through what they term as “flights”, the authors put forward an experimental and non-linear research method that uses imaginative writing and emotional connections to archives, images and lives to bridge the gap between contemporary perspectives and historical lives, effectively turning historical research into a creative and empathetic practice of support across time rooted in a radically feminist formulation of care. Another noteworthy concept is that of the “after image”, which Silvia Casini and Ilona Sagar develop via Sagar’s artworks, such as Correspondence O (2018) and The Body Blow (2022), to reframe medical data and diagnostic visuals by demonstrating how archival traces and imaging technologies produce lingering visual and affective residues that invite critical engagement beyond their role as clinical evidence.
However, perhaps the most significant conceptual contribution of the anthology is the formulation of a curatorial medical humanities that positions curatorial practice as a form of care work, bringing together artworks, medical objects, archival material, and audiences into new relational configurations. As Allison Morehead suggests, curating can function as a “thing method” through which visitors encounter the entanglements of art, illness, and medical history in ways that are affective as well as intellectual (291). This idea ties back to the editors’ framing of the volume itself as a curatorial enterprise, and the book can, in many ways, be read as an exercise in the curatorial medical humanities. Much like a curated exhibition, it assembles a range of formats, voices, and visual materials that invite readers to move between different perspectives and interpretive possibilities. Just as an exhibition space remains open to the visitor’s interpretations, the volume positions itself as generative rather than conclusive, foregrounding the “productive tensions” that emerge between art practice, art history, and the medical humanities. It offers a series of provocations that gesture toward future directions for research and practice (293).
Despite its many strengths, the volume is not without its limitations. Its engagement with mental health, for example, remains somewhat narrow in scope, with most contributions addressing the subject primarily through the lenses of art therapy and art history, leaving out a wide range of contemporary artistic expressions of lived experience with mental illness. Another noticeable gap is that the anthology does not address experiences of health and illness beyond gender binaries, nor does it include creative works from popular visual culture and online platforms such as social media under its rubric of “art.” In addition to these, the volume focuses primarily on visual art, leaving aside other forms such as music and dance. This is particularly notable, as adjacent fields, such as disability studies, actively engage with these embodied artistic practices, as evidenced by a recent special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies devoted to the intersection of dance and disability. While the editors acknowledge some of these limitations, these gaps nonetheless point to productive avenues for future scholarship that could further expand the scope of the critical medical humanities.
About the author
Megha Manjari Mohanty is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, India. Her doctoral work lies in the area of Health Humanities. It is a study of memoirs by persons diagnosed with bipolar disorder and also by caregivers of/to such individuals. You can reach out to her at meghamohanty29@gmail.com
References
Johnstone, Fiona, Alison Morehead and Imogene Wiltshire, eds. Art and the Critical Medical Humanities. Bloomsbury Academic, 2026. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350506367.
Viney, William, Felicity Callard and Angela Woods. ‘Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks’. Medical Humanities, vol. 41, no. 1, June 2015, pp. 2–7.
Whitehead, Anne, and Angela Woods, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
