Journal of Medical Humanities最新文献

While early modern Spain may seem a world away, it is an extremely rich and relevant context for gaining a better understanding of the Rhetoric of Health, specifically the power of metaphor, in the related spheres of policy-making and public debate. It was a time and place in which the urban populace's physical well-being depended upon the fortunes of theatrical performances due to a system of alms for hospitals driven by ticket receipts. Anti-theatricalists argued that the immoral nature of theatrical performances made them spiritually and medically detrimental to society. Pro-theatricalists argued that plays were always a public good on balance because they raised much-needed funds for hospitals. Instead of producing a conflict between morality and public health, each side reinforced their connection until the two topics became nearly inseparable in the sphere of public debate. While pro-theatricalists mainly stayed with their arguments about funding hospitals, anti-theatricalists developed a new strategy of literalising the metaphor of theatre as a "plague of the republic" and arguing that immoral entertainment brought literal disease to the populace as a punishment from God. This exemplifies Stephen Pender's observation of how, in an early modern medical context, "Rhetoric as a way of perceiving probabilities and adjusting one's argument to the audience and circumstance offers a model of ethical action and interaction". This article is organised chronologically to track specific adjustments to a specific public-health debate that rely upon moral metaphors of medicine. Each side wrangled over these metaphors in an effort to break a deadlock in a public-health policy debate with entertainment, finance, and morality at its centre. By the end of the seventeenth century, anti-theatricalists finally found their best rhetorical weapon in the literalisation of the "plague of the republic" metaphor, but it only offered a short-term solution to banning theatre contingent upon the ebb and flow of epidemics. Simultaneously, the finance structure of funding hospitals began to erase the role of hospitals from the longstanding debate about the morality of public theatre. The case of early modern Spain provides valuable lessons about the power of metaphor in the Rhetoric of Healthcare that are still applicable today.

In The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, Virginia Held asserts that those in the position to care should exercise power in ways that avoid violence and damage, and that trust and mutuality should be fostered in place of benevolent domination. With reference to Held's idea of relational care, this essay close reads J. M. Coetzee's depiction of prosthesis refusal in Slow Man as a nuanced critique of caring actions that are devoid of relationality. At the center of the novel is the character Paul Rayment's refusal to get fitted with a prosthetic leg after a cycling accident. He reasons that it is dishonest to give others the false impression that he is not without a leg, even if the price he must pay for "honesty" includes giving up the chance to cycle again and the quality of life he had before the accident. But Coetzee is at pains to highlight that Rayment is a confused character, and behind the confused narrative of "honesty" lies a subtext of rebellion. Specifically, this is a rebellion against care without relationality. It provokes the question, in the absence of ill intention toward the care recipient could caring actions be perfectly benign? In this article, I read the refused prosthetic leg as more than a phantasmagorical symbol of the depicted healthcare professionals' seemingly empty appearance of care; it foregrounds relationality as the critically missing substance that could render caring actions unethical in the novel.