1st Edition

Violence, Care, Cure Self/perceptions within the Medical Encounter

Edited By Marta-Laura Cenedese, Clio Nicastro Copyright 2025
272 Pages 24 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

272 Pages 24 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book explores the notions of violence, care, and cure within the medical encounter and seeks to foreground the ways in which, whether individually or as a triad, they are prone to ambiguous interpretations. The chapters of this book attend to the complex interlacing of these three key terms and what to make of their entanglement by offering historical, practical, philosophical, personal, and... Read more

Introduction: Violence, Care, Cure: (Self-)Perceptions Within the Medical Encounter

Marta-Laura Cenedese and Clio Nicastro

Musing 1: Narrative Medicine, Racial Justice and The Black Maternal Mortality Crisis

Mita Banerjee

Part 1: Medical Histories and Biopolitics

1. Touching Matters of Care: A Visual Approach to Care and Violence in Dr Marie Stopes’ Birth Control Campaign

Nora Heidorn

2. Politics In the Time of Cholera: COVID, Table Manners, and Bio-Politics

Federico Dal Bo

3. Bio-Story: Michel Foucault and The History of Social Medicine

Xenia Chiaramonte

Musing 2: Counteracting Psychiatric Violence Through Critical Heritage Studies and Cooperation

Elisabeth Punzi, Helen Johansson, and Annica Engström

Part 2: Unsettling and Working Through Practices and Languages of Cure

4. The ‘Interpretation Workshop’ As Artistic Research: A Methodological Approach to Original Biographical National Socialist Writings

Lena Ditte Nissen

5. ‘The Way Out Is Via the Door’: R.D. Laing and the Cure from The Family

Janina Klement

6. ‘Io Sono Matta’: Psychiatric Violence, Militant Madness, and Sexual Difference in Alberto Grifi’s ‘Anthropology of Disobedience’

Sophia Rohwetter

7. The Denied Poetics of Global Psychiatry and Frantz Fanon’s Poetisation of Science

Lisa Schmidt-Herzog

Musing 3: Fanon, Epistemic Injustice, and the Colonial Medical Encounter

Daniele Lorenzini

Part 3: Agency in Illness and Ethics of Suffering                  

8. Narrative Autonomy to The Test of Illness

Silvia Pierosara

9. Plumbing The Perpetual Loss of Paradise: Susan Taubes and Sacred Suffering

Rachel Pafe

10. Almodóvar’s Anatomies

Hannah Parlett

Musing 4: On Care and Violence in Medical Humanities Research Collaborations

Angela Woods

Part 4: Anatomy of a Transformation

11. T For Trans: An Outraged Investigation of Non-Binary Medical Transition in Germany

Claude Kempen

12. I Am Not My MRI

Maria Morata

13. Surprised By the Night: On the Traversal of a Dysphoric Phantasy

Myriam Sauer

14. Afterword: Moral Value in Medicine: Violence, Cure, and Care

Sander L. Gilman

Biography

Marta‑Laura Cenedese is UKRI (MSCA Horizon Guarantee) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Marta is a literary scholar specialising in postcolonial literatures, memory studies, critical medical humanities, queer death studies, and decolonial feminism. She is the author of Irène Némirovsky’s Russian Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov (2021) and editor of Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s) (2023). Her research has been published in Comparative Literature, Storyworlds, Journal of Medical Humanities, Modern and Contemporary France, and elsewhere. Marta was an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin (2020–2024) and has been a visiting fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Humboldt University Berlin (2020) and at the Centre d’Histoire, Sciences‑o Paris (2023).

Clio Nicastro is a researcher in Philosophy, Cultural Studies, and Film Studies affiliated with Bard College Berlin. She studied philosophy at the University of Palermo, where she completed her PhD in Aesthetics and Theory of Arts. She was DAAD postdoctoral fellow as well as fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, where she held an additional one‑year postdoctoral position research thanks to a VolkswagenStiftung grant. She is the author of La Dialettica del Denkraum in Aby Warburg (2022) as well as the co‑editor with Cristina Baldacci and Arianna Sforzini of the volume Over and Over and Over again. Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (2022). She is a member of the board of directors of the Harun Farocki Institut.

“This thought-provoking and rich edited volume explores the concepts of violence, care and cure as part of the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on the medical encounter. Contributions by leading and emerging scholars from an impressive range of disciplines engage the reader in historical, practical, philosophical and creative reflections that open up new dimensions of research across the fields of medicine and humanities. An eye-opening read for scholars and professionals interested in new and self-reflective approaches to the study and practice of medicine through the humanities and vice versa.”

 

Heike Bartel, Professor of German Studies and Health Humanities, The University of Nottingham, UK

"In healthcare and medicine, efforts to care and cure are entangled with violence in complex ways. The contributions in this book highlight the potential of medical humanities to uncover systemic biases and broaden our understanding of medical encounters. The volume is an essential contribution to scholarship, opening new avenues for research and reflection."

Anna Ovaska, Research Fellow in Narrative Studies, Tampere University, Finland