The Medical Imagination traces the practice of using imagination and literature to craft, test, and implement theories of health in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. This history of imaginative experimentation provides a usable past for conversations about the role of the humanities in health research and practice today.

In this groundbreaking collection of essays, medical scientists in a number of fields join with practitioners from the fields of non-Western medicine"the Asklepieia, body/soul therapies, and dreamwork"to explore the intimate relationship between imagination and physical health. By looking at medical science, these scholars, physicians, and healers offer their vision of what medical treatment and psychotherapy might look like in the future. Artists and architects with expertise in health care also describe and present new designs for healing centers that bring together current scientific knowledge and age-old healing practices. This collection will be of great interest to those looking to the future in the fields of therapy, medicine, and the healing professions.

This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic’s collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy’s collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic’s prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.

Did you know that intentional dreaming has been used to solve life's problems? Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel sets out Robert Bosnak's practice of embodied imagination and demonstrates how he actually works with dreams and memories in groups. The book discusses various approaches to dreams, body and imagination, and combines this with a Jungian, neurobiological, relational and cultural analysis. The author's fascination with dreams, the most absolute form of embodied imagination, has caused him to travel all over the world. From his research he concludes that while dreaming everyone everywhere experiences dreams as embodied events in time and space while the dreamer is convinced of being awake; it is after waking into our specific cultural stories about dreaming that the widely differing attitudes towards dreams arise. By taking dreaming reality, not our waking interpretation of it, as the model for imagination, this book creates a paradigm shock and produces methods which can be applied in a wide variety of cultural settings. Through detailed case studies, professionals and students will find thorough discussions of: ways to flashback into dreams and memories while in a hypnagogic state of consciousness the practice of embodied imagination and its profound physical effects psyche as a self-organizing multiplicity of selves the nature of subjectivity the body as a theatre of sense memories the limitation of reason the process of dissociation the treatment of trauma This book discusses a variety of techniques which may be applied by health professionals to their patients and clients. It will also be of particular interest to Jungian and relational psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists, as well as to artists, actors, directors, writers and other individuals who wish to explore the creative imagination.

Significant study of colonial Caribbean literatures in the context of the high rates of disease and death in the region.

Presents over 2,000 years of medical illustrations, including paintings, artifacts, drawings, prints, and extracts from manuscripts and manuals.

The Medical Imagination traces the practice of using imagination and literature to craft, test, and implement theories of health in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. This history of imaginative experimentation provides a usable past for conversations about the role of the humanities in health research and practice today.