Introduction: Bridging the Divide Between Literature and Medicine

The first part of the introduction discusses the need for scholarship that reconnects the disciplines of literature and medicine, which were not separated until the Early Modern period when the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy was mapped onto and institutionalized by the split between the sciences and the humanities. It briefly surveys the history of the related fields of “literature and medicine” and “medical humanities,” which emerged in the 1970s, and discusses their impact on present-day interdisciplinary scholarship. The second part of the introduction describes the four parts of the handbook: history and pedagogy, the mind-body connection, physical and cultural alterity, and the professionalization of medicine. The chapters in each of these thematic clusters focus on one particular way of reconnecting the disciplines of literature and medicine and, by extension, the humanities and the sciences.