Review of Rebecca Garden’s “Who Speaks for Whom? Health Humanities and the Ethics of Representation

摘要

A great deal of attention in the medical humanities is given to the tension between medical science and the patients' subjective experience. Rebecca Garden, in her article, highlights dominant trends in existing scholarship that characterize the humanities as remedial to the scientism of medical practice. On the one hand, medical science reduces illness to purely physiological manifestations within the patients' body. This neglects the psychic and social dimensions of illness, alienating from the process of treatment the patient's experience and identity. On the other hand, then, the medical humanities (or, as Garden prefers, the more inclusive term "health humanities") give voice to the patients' experience of illness in order to recover their autonomy and identity from the surrender to the authority and jargon of medical science. The health humanities' primary function, according to Garden, is thus one of "advocacy" (1). Drawing from a broad and comprehensive repertoire of scholarship on narrative medicine, Garden examines the role and the ethical responsibilities of the medical humanities in the context of medical treatment