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Send proposals via mail or e-mail to:
Susan Wadsworth-Booth
The Kent State University Press
1118 Library
Kent, OH 44242-0001 USA
swadswo2@kent.edu
Carol Donley and Martin Kohn, Founding Editors
The Literature and Medicine series focuses on the human context of illness and health through multiple genres; from poems, short stories, and drama to critical essays, memoirs, and historical accounts. Titles in the series are designed to provide students, educators, and health care professionals with key texts and strategies for humanities-based inquiry. We are particularly interested in multi-authored anthologies that present the diverse experiences of illness and healing, death and dying, and the normal and the pathological for use in classrooms and other educational settings.

What We Bring to the Practice of Medicine

and | Filed under: Explore Women's History, Health Humanities, Literature & Medicine, Recent Releases, Women’s Studies
Greene-Liebowitz Cover w/ border

While men and women physicians face different challenges and bring different historical experiences to the examination table, the history of medicine has been primarily told by men. Doctors Kimberly Greene-Liebowitz and Dana Corriel compile the pieces in this collection to highlight the many topics of concern for women physicians––some of which may be unknown to medical field outsiders. Topics include the physician-patient relationship, mastery of clinical practice, barriers to career advancement and success, and the challenge of balancing a demanding professional life with domestic responsibilities, an issue brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic.

 


So Much More Than a Headache

| Filed under: Literature & Medicine, Medicine, Recent Releases
So Much More than a Headache by Kathleen O'Shea. Kent State University Press.

Editor Kathleen O’Shea has managed to gather a wide selection of helpful excerpts, chapters, poetry, and even a short play in this anthology—all with a view toward increasing our understanding and ending the stigma attached to migraines and migraine sufferers. Unlike clinical materials, this anthology addresses the feelings and symptoms that the writers have experienced, sometimes daily. These pieces speak freely about the loneliness and helplessness one feels when a migraine comes on. The sufferer faces nausea, pain, sensitivity to light, and having the veracity of all these symptoms doubted by others. O’Shea, a professor of literature and a migraine sufferer herself, also includes an original essay of her own reflections.

 


The Health Humanities and Camus’s The Plague

| Filed under: Literature & Medicine, Recent Releases
The Health and Humanities and Camus's Plague edited by Woods Nash. Kent State University Press.

Camus’s The Plague, first published in 1947, is widely regarded as a classic of 20th-century fiction and as an interesting point of reference for the field of health humanities. Woods Nash’s edited collection of essays by diverse hands explores how The Plague illuminates important themes, ideas, dilemmas, and roles in modern healthcare, helping readers—and particularly medical students and professionals—understand issues related to their training and practice in a dramatic and stimulating context.

 


From Reading to Healing

and | Filed under: Literature & Literary Criticism, Literature & Medicine, Medicine, Recent Releases
From Reading to Healing by Stagno and Blackie. Kent State University Press

In this expansive anthology, Susan Stagno and Michael Blackie assemble an insightful group of contributors to discuss the ways in which medical professionals can powerfully engage with their students through a variety of literary texts. Examples as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Leo Tolstoy, William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Mary Shelley, Stephen King, the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, and the sayings of Buddha will provide both teachers and students a rich cache of stories for discussion and inspiration.

 


Learning to Heal

and | Filed under: Literature & Literary Criticism, Literature & Medicine, Medicine, Poetry, Recent Releases

What is it like to be a student nurse? What are the joys, the stresses, the transcendent moments, the fall-off-your-bed-laughing moments, and the terrors that have to be faced and stared down? And how might nurses, looking back, relate these experiences in ways that bring these memories to life again and provide historical context for how nursing education has changed and yet remained the same?

In brave, revealing, and often humorous poetry and prose, Learning to Heal explores these questions with contributions by nurses from a variety of social, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds. Readers meet a black nursing student who is surrounded by white teachers and patients in 1940, a mother who rises every morning at 5 a.m. to help her family ready for their day before she herself heads to anatomy class, and an itinerant Jewish teenager who is asked, “What will you become?” These individuals, and many other women and men, share personal stories of finding their way to nursing school, where they begin a long, often wonderful, and sometimes daunting, journey.

 


Human Voices Wake Us

| Filed under: Literature & Medicine, Medicine, Poetry
Winakur Cover

Doctors today are struggling: debt, divorce, substance abuse, burnout, suicide. They succeed or fail on professional treadmills; patient encounters measured out with coffee spoons. The doctor-patient relationship is crumbling. Bureaucratic and corporate masters make their never-ending arguments of insidious intent. The overwhelming questions: Now where to turn? How do physicians—and their patients—avoid being crushed by the demands of science, of perfection, of expectations? How do we recover the awe we once felt in this world in which we expend our life force every day? How can we find joy once more?

 


Keeping Reflection Fresh

and | Filed under: Literature & Medicine
Peterkin Cover

Curriculum committees at health professional schools are determined that faculty engage students in reflection. Reflective practice invites students to inquire into their own thoughts, biases, assumptions, feelings, and behaviors and to reconnect with their own sense of purpose and commitment to their work. In Keeping Reflection Fresh, practitioners, educators, and students in medical humanities, bioethics, nursing, emergency medicine, geriatrics, psychiatry, family medicine, surgery, medical education, and other fields join artists, musicians, poets, and writers to present an illuminating and innovative collection of provocative essays. The contributors—including Louise Aronson, Jay Baruch, Alan Bleakley, Rita Charon, Jack Coulehan, Sayantani DasGupta, Therese Jones, and Delese Wear, among many others—offer insights, guidance, and strategies designed to inspire new concepts, connections, and conversations, enrich practices, and stimulate scholarly inquiry.

 


Mysterious Medicine

| Filed under: Literature & Literary Criticism, Literature & Medicine, Medicine
Dunn cover

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were masters of mystery and fantasy, but they also engaged real controversies surrounding individual health, health care practice, and biomedical research in nineteenth-century America. During this volatile era, when mesmerists, phrenologists, and other pseudoscientists reigned and “regular” physicians were just beginning to consolidate power, Hawthorne and Poe provided important critiques of experimental and often haphazard systems of care, as well as insights into the evolving understanding of mental and physical pathologies. As writers, they responded to the social, historical, and medical forces of their own time, yet they also addressed themes of bioethics, humanism, and patient-centered care that remain relevant in the twenty-first century.

 


What’s Left Out

| Filed under: Fiction, Literature & Medicine, Medicine
baruch cover

Conventional medical narratives often fail to capture the incoherent, surreal, and logic-twisting reality of the contemporary healthcare experience, where mystery, absurdity, and even cruelty are disguised as logic, reason, and compassion. In this new collection of stories by physician and writer Jay Baruch, characters struggle in their quest for meaning and a more hopeful tomorrow in a strange landscape where motivations are complex and convoluted and what is considered good and just operates as a perpetually shifting proposition.

 


When the Nurse Becomes a Patient

| Filed under: Award Winners, Literature & Medicine, Medicine
Davis cover

In the summer of 2013, Cortney Davis, a nurse practitioner and author who often writes about her interactions with patients, underwent routine one-day surgery. A surgical mishap led to a series of life-altering and life-threatening complications, resulting in two prolonged hospital stays and a lengthy recovery. During twenty-six days in the hospital, Davis experienced how suddenly a caregiver can become a care receiver and what it’s like to be “on the other side of the sickbed.” As a nurse, she was accustomed to suffering and to the empathy such witnessing can evoke, but as a patient she learned new and transforming lessons in pain, fear, loneliness, abandonment, and dependency; in the fragility of health and life; in the necessity of family support; and, ultimately, in the importance of gratitude.

 



This is a series archive