A patient’s description of their pain or a community’s understanding of a disease often carries information that a blood test or a scan cannot capture, yet medicine has no systematic way to study these experiences. This project brings together artists, historians, philosophers, and clinicians to examine the subjective and cultural dimensions of illness—how people feel, describe, and make sense of being sick, and how societies draw the line between health and disease. Biomedical science excels at curing and treating, but it does not pretend to illuminate what it *means* to be ill, or why different cultures define the same symptoms differently. The researchers will establish a Centre for Health Sciences and the Humanities at King’s College London and launch a Master’s programme in Medical Humanities. If successful, this work could reshape how medical students are trained, how clinicians interpret patient narratives, and how public health campaigns are designed. The project is fundamentally exploratory—it does not aim to produce a new drug or diagnostic tool—but by making the invisible, subjective side of illness a subject of rigorous study, it could change what counts as evidence in medicine.
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We propose a programme of work on "The Boundaries of Illness" that has the following main aims: 1. To engage scholars from arts, humanities and health disciplines. 1a To investigate what the Humanities can contribute to understanding the subjective, "inner" experience of illness. 1b To study personal and cultural representations of health and illness and the boundaries between them. 2. To establish a Master's programme in the Medical Humanities at King's College London. 3. To extend the College's existing capacity in Medical Humanities at masters, doctoral, post-doctoral and international levels. The proposal's two overarching research aims, specified in 1a + 1b above, seek to elucidate problem areas that are beyond the methods and scope of biomedical science alone. Biomedical science has defined illness in ways that have proved profoundly productive from a curative and ameliorative point of view. But biomedical science cannot - and does not pretend to - illuminate either the subjectivity of illness experience, or the cultural meanings of health and disease. The Humanities are well-placed to contribute to our understanding of these two areas. We will set up a Centre for Health Sciences and the Humanities which will bring together a group of experienced academics spanning a wide range of the Humanities, health sciences and clinical practice, to undertake a broad interdisciplinary programme of research and education in the Medical Humanities.
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