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.

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

This book presents ten new chapters on John Keats's medical imagination, beginning with his practical engagement with dissection and surgery, and the extraordinary poems he wrote during his 'busy time' at Guy's Hospital 1815-17. The Physical Society at Guy's and the demands of a medical career are explored, as are the lyrical spheres of botany, melancholia, and Keats's strange oxymoronic poetics of suspended animation. Here too are links between surveillance of patients at Bedlam and of inner city streets that were walked by the poet of 'To Autumn'. The book concludes with a survey of multiple romantic pathologies of that most Keatsian of diseases, pulmonary tuberculosis.

The human imagination gives rise to the most beautiful man-made structures and creations on Earth: architecture, literature, theatre, music, art, humanitarian initiatives, moon landings and space exploration, mythology, science, they all require a large dose of imagination. We all live surrounded by the results of the imagination of our peers, and the creations of our ancestors. Without imagination there is no compassion, no moral compass and no progress. But without imagination there is also no fear of death. There are no premeditated murders or terrorist attacks; these rely on the human ability to imagine, to call up images and test-drive possible scenarios in the human mind. Once we get out the magnifying glass, we discover that the imagination is a double-edged sword. All of us together, humanity as a collective, are creating very confused and mixed outcomes: world peace remains elusive, wars rage and children starve. Addictions and pollution proliferate. Medicine of the Imagination: Dwelling in Possibility examines these issues and suggests that if we are to transcend religious wars, homophobia and medical “cures” worse than the diseases we face then it that it is our moral duty to engage our imagination in service to other people.

Argues that the pace of medical discoveries has slowed in the last twenty-five years due to excessive emphasis on the social and political aspects of health care, and to controversies caused by ethical issues.

Fully illustrated with hundreds of artworks, this guide explores depictions of illness and healing in Western art.

Elizabeth Blackwell, though born in England, was reared in the United States and was the first woman to receive a medical degree here, obtaining it from the Geneva Medical College, Geneva, New York, in 1849. A pioneer in opening the medical profession to women, she founded hospitals and medical schools for women in both the United States and England. She was a lecturer and writer as well as an able physician and organizer. -- H.W. Orr.