Journal of Medical Humanities - About the Journal of Medical Humanities

Since 1979, Journal of Medical Humanities (JMH) has been one of a few scholarly journals focused entirely on the health humanities. First as Bioethics Quarterly, then as the Journal of Bioethics, later as the Journal of Medical Humanities and Bioethics, and finally as the Journal of Medical Humanities, JMH has provided a space to imagine, create, and contest this growing field of inquiry. Since 1997, under the editorships of Delese Wear and Tess Jones, the journal has published scholarship in cultural studies that augments and at times challenges more traditional investigations in bioethics, medical humanities, and medical education. That addition—including significant inquiry into race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, as well as medical education, the health professions, and health care as a system—has defined the journal’s enduring scholarly contribution.

Starting in 2022, JMH seeks to build on this rich history with a focus on health humanities as a conceptual field. Teaching and research in the health humanities have grown exponentially over the past decades. New baccalaureate, graduate, and professional programs abound internationally, and scholars can now train primarily in health humanities and seek academic positions in the field. To best serve this new academic and intellectual reality, JMH seeks to amplify scholarship that explicitly engages field-defining questions and concerns.

Health humanities signals a broad terrain of health, illness, and embodied experience, as well as the range of health professions and practices. As a field of inquiry, it emerges from the understanding that human experiences of health and illness are varied, deeply personal as well as culturally situated, and mediated through a range of social, economic, political, environmental, biotechnical, and representational structures. Health humanities emphasizes expressive capacities as well as critical approaches. Its relation to medicine as an institution, profession, and practice is historically significant and ongoing, but not all-encompassing. In health professions education, health humanities promotes humanistic practice, well-being, and reflective and situational awareness through the study of narrative and rhetoric, visual and performing arts, ethnography, history, and ethics. Scholarly domains such as disability, critical race, feminist, and LGBTQIA+ studies, as well as political economy and global, decolonial approaches, amplify and deepen the health humanities as a field committed to social justice and critical consciousness.