Courting Inspiration: How the Health Humanities Can Pattern the Imagination of Physicians to Resolve Medicine's...

The dominant genres of the American healthcare system-electronic health records and research reports-are strategies for advancing commercial and empirical goals. These strategies have led us into an epistemic crisis in which clinicians and patients suffer from information overload, politicized health information, and conflicting narratives about medical practices across the lifespan, from vaccines in childhood to care at the end of life, resulting in a loss of trust between clinicians and patients. Two recent books offer insight into how previous epistemic crises were resolved by the patterning of physicians' imaginations through genres now associated with health humanities. In her history of medicine in the early United States, the literary scholar Sari Altschuler shows how physicians used limericks, maps, and satires to address epistemic crises resulting from pandemics and the development of novel technologies. In her philosophy of art and imagination, the theologian Judith Wolfe shows how perceptual shifts can direct people and communities to new ends. When read in conversation, the works of Altschuler and Wolfe suggest the health humanities can provide novel strategies otherwise unavailable to physicians facing our current epistemic crisis.