In today’s podcast, EIC Brandy Schillace and Dr. Sara Wasson of Lancaster University discuss the medical humanities as a way of “interrogating medicine.” So often, the humanities (literature, history, anthropology, social science, arts and more) are treated as add-ons, or “soft” skills merely engaged to make the practice of medicine more empathetic or, in the case of stressful medical education, more bearable. Instead, however, these disciplines provide a necessary criticism of medical systems and of practice and process. In fact, Dr. Wasson argues that literary scholarship and criticism can be absolutely core to engaging something like pain. She speaks to her work in 2018 for MH’s special issue on Pain and its Paradoxes, providing the ways in which humanities do more than offer an extension of a medical gaze. Instead, it offers enlightenment to the narratives of pain, as of any human experience. This deep engagement can move beyond the medical sphere and into the public arena. Join us at Soundcloud for more: INTERROGATING MEDICINE