the human dimensions of healthcare
The Centre for the Humanities and Health (CHH) is a UK leader in the Health Humanities, dedicated to researching the cultural meaning and lived experiences of wellbeing and illness through humanities and creative arts scholarship and practices. CHH is interested in investigating the roles patient experiences play in cultural and medical discourses and how they are valued or disregarded as forms of evidence and expertise contributing to medical and scientific knowledge. CHH aims to:
- raise academic and public awareness of the Health Humanities as a locus of research, reflection and teaching on health, wellbeing and illness
- revalorise subjectivity in healthcare practices and scholarship
- engage with healthcare services, researchers and patient organisations
- provide training at masters, PhD, and postdoctoral levels for humanities, medical, nursing and science students.
People
Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy
Reader in Classical Archaeology and Liberal Arts
Professor of Ethics and Digital Culture
Professor of Philosophy and Psychopathology
Professor in Global Health and Social Medicine
Senior Lecturer in Medical Ethics
Publications
Selected publications
Neil Vickers
- “The body in Martin Amis’s Experience (2000),” Textual Practice, 31.7 (2017), pp. 1459-1480
- “Illness and femininity in Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost (2003),” Textual Practice 33.1 (2019), 917-939
Brian Hurwitz
- James Parkinson’s chimera: syndrome or disease? Kempster, P. A., Hurwitz, B. & Lees, A. J., Jun 2017, In : Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. 47, 2, p. 190-195
- Narrative constructs in modern clinical case reporting Hurwitz, B., Apr 2017, In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 62, p. 65-73
- What Archie Cochrane learnt from a single case Hurwitz, B., 11 Feb 2017, In: Lancet. 389, 10069, p. 594-595
- The Clinical Narratives of James Parkinson’s Essay on the Shaking Palsy (1817) Hurwitz, B. S., Aug 2016, The Routledge History of Disease. Jackson, M. (ed.). Routledge
- Urban observation and sentiment in James Parkinson's Essay on the Shaking Palsy (1817) Hurwitz, B., 2014, In : Literature and Medicine. 32, 1, p. 74-104
- Healthcare serial killings: Was the Case of Dr Harold Shipman Unthinkable? Hurwitz, B., 2013, Bioethics, Medicine and the Criminal Law: Medicine, Crime and Society. Griffiths, D. & Sanders, A. (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Vol. 2. p. 13-42
- Textual Practices in Crafting Bioethics Cases Hurwitz, B., Dec 2012, In : Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. 9, 4, p. 395-401
- Clinical Cases and Clinical Case Reports: Boundaries and Porosities Hurwitz, B., 15 Aug 2011, The Case and the Canon: Anomalies, Discontinuities, Metaphors Between Science and Literature (Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities).. Morisco, B., Turchetti, G., Calanchi, A. & Castellani, G. (eds.). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, p. 45-58 (Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities)).
- Hurwitz B. Form and representation in clinical case reports. Literature and Medicine 2006 25:2; 216-40.
Most recent publications from CHH
Awards
Shifting How We View the Ageing Process
As part of her UKRI FLF research programme on ageing, The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY), Martina Zimmermann (English) and collaborators at the Policy Institute at King’s College London have hosted a Policy Lab about ‘Shifting How We View the Ageing Process’. The Lab brought together academic researchers from a range of disciplines, practicing clinicians, people with lived experience and representatives from the care sector, charities and the policy world, to answer one specific question in a one-day workshop: ‘How valuable, feasible and acceptable would it be to shift the way we view the ageing process?’. Condensing findings from the Lab, the resulting Report aims to achieve attitudinal change to ageing, by moving away from a narrative of disease and decline towards the idea that ageing is a lifelong process of change.
Sound Young Minds
£62,000 Strategic Award from King’s Together July 2019
The aim is to evaluate the City of London Sinfonia’s work with young people to make music at the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospitals.
Joint PIs: Sally Marlow and Brian Hurwitz.
The Person in Medicine
£20,000 Strategic Award from King’s Together July 2019
Our aim is to establish a cross-disciplinary collaboration with our French colleagues on the theme of personhood in the era of personalised medicine and long-term conditions.
Joint PIs: Neil Vickers and Patrick Ffrench.
The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth
£1,05M UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship July 2020
This project explores how we (basic sciences, medical practice and wider culture) talk and think about ageing and how the way we do so can affect our experiences of ageing as well as how we prioritise concerns of older people.
PI: Martina Zimmermann
Activities
Lifelong Ageing: A discipline- and sector-crossing event hosted by CHH
As part of the SAACY research programme, we ran an event called Lifelong Ageing at Science Gallery London in May 2023. The one-day workshop aimed to bring together early career researchers and representatives from local and national charities and other third-sector organisations – all with an interest in ageing as a lifelong process.
Shifting How We View the Ageing Process: A Policy Report published as part of the SAACY research programme
The first Policy Report of the CHH-hosted research programme on ageing, The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY), has been published this autumn (2023)! Take a look following this link.
Whose face is it anyway? The history and politics of facial transplantation - 22 March 2023
In this paper, Fay Bound Alberti, Professor in Modern History at King’s College London, examines the challenges, politics and ethics of facial transplantation through a discussion of its history, clinical development, psychosocial impacts, and ethical entanglements. The issues raised in this paper – and the work of Interface, which is funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship – move beyond the scope of experimental surgery to pose broader questions about embodiment, identity and what it means to be human.
Graeco-Roman Cures by Pretence: A Peculiarly Human Accomplishment - 8 March 2023
An analysis is proposed of how these manoeuvres work at the cognitive and sensory level of patients, which takes account of the illusions they engender through suggestion and misdirection. I examine how such treatments are performed within practitioner patient relationships, and their dependence on public understanding of culturally sanctioned schemas of medical treatment and explanation. In deploying manipulations which make no recourse to supernatural or occult powers, pretend cures, I argue, represent an important Graeco-Roman human accomplishment.
Getting Older Film Club: SAACY Events
SAACY runs a film club on the theme of ageing, hoping to show depictions of the ageing process in all its diversity. In collaboration with the Centre for Health Humanities, our Getting Older Film Club screens a series of films on fortnightly Thursday evenings that address our idea that ageing is not something bad that happens at the end of life but a process of lifelong change. All are welcome including King’s students and staff, and SAACY project partners. For more details follow the link below:
CHH Blog: A Workshop on 'The Mouth'
On the 7 December 2022 a group of us assembled for a workshop on the topic of ‘the Mouth’, with the aim to discuss the different perspectives at play between Arts and Humanities approaches and those of the caring professions and the disciplines bearing upon them, in this case Dentistry.
Conversations across the medical humanities · Nov 2021
CHH has been facilitating conversations across departments and faculties at KCL, putting researchers in different fields into contact with one another in order to bring out new dimensions of their individual research.
Dr Tania Gergel on advance directives for mental illness
"The debate over self-binding directives has been working through these issues since the 1980s. However, one voice that was largely missing was the voice of ‘lived experience’", says Dr Tania Gergel for Psyche.co
Disability + Intersectionality Reading Group · Jul 2021
Disability+Intersectionality is a fortnightly reading group which meets to discuss key texts in critical disability studies, situating them within the broader context of the humanities and social sciences.
CHH virtual book club · Jul 2021
CHH ran a virtual book club themed around pandemics. Participants met regularly to discuss the books during the first UK lockdown, and many fascinating conversations came out of these texts.
News
Professor Dame Anne Marie Rafferty honoured in New Year's Honours List
King’s College London is proud to announce that Professor Dame Anne Marie Rafferty CBE has been nominated for a life Peerage within the House of Lords in the...
Illness changes how humans see each other, says new book
A new book by two King’s professors suggests that major illness impacts the recognition that humans give each other and proposes an alternative approach to...
Katherine McKittrick delivers Sylvia Wynter Lecture
Professor Katherine McKittrick, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen's University Canada, delivered the 2024-25 Sylvia Wynter Lecture...
Little has changed in four decades of dementia care, finds King's study
A new study has found ineffective co-ordination of services and fragmented care plans in England has resulted in very little improving for dementia carers in...
Events
SLSAeu 2025/SAACY Conference - The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies
We are excited to announce that SAACY is hosting the SLSAeu Conference at King’s College London in June 2025.
The health humanities, the critical medical humanities and the future of the field
Explore the health humanities, critical medical humanities and future of the field with Professor Neil Vickers.
Please note: this event has passed.
Narrative and the discovery of 'culture' 1980-1995
Professor Neil Vickers presents on narrative and the discovery of 'culture' in relation to the medical humanities.
Please note: this event has passed.
“In the beginning was the chaplaincy”: the religious origins of the medical humanities, 1960-1980
Join Professor Neil Vickers for an examination of the medical humanities' religious beginnings.
Please note: this event has passed.
A Lifelong Ageing Fair in London: Bringing together researchers, charities and the local community
This day-long event will be open to the public, bringing together academic researchers, third-sector organisations, and the local community around King’s and...
Please note: this event has passed.
Education
Modules in the Health Humanities
The following modules offer a sample of the opportunities available for undergraduate (levels 4,5 and 6) and taught postgraduate (level 7) students to study topics related to the health humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, subject to availability in any one year.
Department of Classics
- 5AACTL36 Ancient Sexuality I
- 6AACTL81 Classical Antiquity at the Fin de Siècle: Art, Sexuality, Religion and Madness
Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries
- 5AAIC001 Diversity Matters
- 6AAIC003 Sustainability, Care and Culture
Department of Digital Humanities
- 7AAVDC20 Digital Health
Department of English
- 5AAEB016 Literature and Psychoanalysis
- 7AAEM831 Illness Narrative as Life Writing
- 7AAEM735 Biopower: The Fate of an Idea
Department of History
- 5AAH1081: Drugs, Disease, and Demi-Gods: Health and Healing in the Early Modern World
- 6AAH3037 From the NHS to Obamacare: Health and Healthcare in British and American Life
- 6AAH4019 Bodies
- 7AAH2033/7AAH2019 The Public History of Science, Technology and Medicine
- 7AAH8012/7AAH8008 Medicine, Modernity and the Body
- 7AAH8013/7AAH8009 Ways of Knowing: Understanding the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
- 7AAFM032 ‘The Other Side of Reason’: Literature, Philosophy, Madness
- 7ABA0008 Melancholia and Hypochondria in 18th Century European Literature
Department of Philosophy
- 5AAN5001 Neuroscience and the Mind
- 7AAN2058 Philosophy of Medicine
- 7AAN2003 The Concept of Mental Disorder
People
Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy
Reader in Classical Archaeology and Liberal Arts
Professor of Ethics and Digital Culture
Professor of Philosophy and Psychopathology
Professor in Global Health and Social Medicine
Senior Lecturer in Medical Ethics
Publications
Selected publications
Neil Vickers
- “The body in Martin Amis’s Experience (2000),” Textual Practice, 31.7 (2017), pp. 1459-1480
- “Illness and femininity in Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost (2003),” Textual Practice 33.1 (2019), 917-939
Brian Hurwitz
- James Parkinson’s chimera: syndrome or disease? Kempster, P. A., Hurwitz, B. & Lees, A. J., Jun 2017, In : Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. 47, 2, p. 190-195
- Narrative constructs in modern clinical case reporting Hurwitz, B., Apr 2017, In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 62, p. 65-73
- What Archie Cochrane learnt from a single case Hurwitz, B., 11 Feb 2017, In: Lancet. 389, 10069, p. 594-595
- The Clinical Narratives of James Parkinson’s Essay on the Shaking Palsy (1817) Hurwitz, B. S., Aug 2016, The Routledge History of Disease. Jackson, M. (ed.). Routledge
- Urban observation and sentiment in James Parkinson's Essay on the Shaking Palsy (1817) Hurwitz, B., 2014, In : Literature and Medicine. 32, 1, p. 74-104
- Healthcare serial killings: Was the Case of Dr Harold Shipman Unthinkable? Hurwitz, B., 2013, Bioethics, Medicine and the Criminal Law: Medicine, Crime and Society. Griffiths, D. & Sanders, A. (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Vol. 2. p. 13-42
- Textual Practices in Crafting Bioethics Cases Hurwitz, B., Dec 2012, In : Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. 9, 4, p. 395-401
- Clinical Cases and Clinical Case Reports: Boundaries and Porosities Hurwitz, B., 15 Aug 2011, The Case and the Canon: Anomalies, Discontinuities, Metaphors Between Science and Literature (Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities).. Morisco, B., Turchetti, G., Calanchi, A. & Castellani, G. (eds.). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, p. 45-58 (Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities)).
- Hurwitz B. Form and representation in clinical case reports. Literature and Medicine 2006 25:2; 216-40.
Most recent publications from CHH
Awards
Shifting How We View the Ageing Process
As part of her UKRI FLF research programme on ageing, The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY), Martina Zimmermann (English) and collaborators at the Policy Institute at King’s College London have hosted a Policy Lab about ‘Shifting How We View the Ageing Process’. The Lab brought together academic researchers from a range of disciplines, practicing clinicians, people with lived experience and representatives from the care sector, charities and the policy world, to answer one specific question in a one-day workshop: ‘How valuable, feasible and acceptable would it be to shift the way we view the ageing process?’. Condensing findings from the Lab, the resulting Report aims to achieve attitudinal change to ageing, by moving away from a narrative of disease and decline towards the idea that ageing is a lifelong process of change.
Sound Young Minds
£62,000 Strategic Award from King’s Together July 2019
The aim is to evaluate the City of London Sinfonia’s work with young people to make music at the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospitals.
Joint PIs: Sally Marlow and Brian Hurwitz.
The Person in Medicine
£20,000 Strategic Award from King’s Together July 2019
Our aim is to establish a cross-disciplinary collaboration with our French colleagues on the theme of personhood in the era of personalised medicine and long-term conditions.
Joint PIs: Neil Vickers and Patrick Ffrench.
The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth
£1,05M UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship July 2020
This project explores how we (basic sciences, medical practice and wider culture) talk and think about ageing and how the way we do so can affect our experiences of ageing as well as how we prioritise concerns of older people.
PI: Martina Zimmermann
Activities
Lifelong Ageing: A discipline- and sector-crossing event hosted by CHH
As part of the SAACY research programme, we ran an event called Lifelong Ageing at Science Gallery London in May 2023. The one-day workshop aimed to bring together early career researchers and representatives from local and national charities and other third-sector organisations – all with an interest in ageing as a lifelong process.
Shifting How We View the Ageing Process: A Policy Report published as part of the SAACY research programme
The first Policy Report of the CHH-hosted research programme on ageing, The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY), has been published this autumn (2023)! Take a look following this link.
Whose face is it anyway? The history and politics of facial transplantation - 22 March 2023
In this paper, Fay Bound Alberti, Professor in Modern History at King’s College London, examines the challenges, politics and ethics of facial transplantation through a discussion of its history, clinical development, psychosocial impacts, and ethical entanglements. The issues raised in this paper – and the work of Interface, which is funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship – move beyond the scope of experimental surgery to pose broader questions about embodiment, identity and what it means to be human.
Graeco-Roman Cures by Pretence: A Peculiarly Human Accomplishment - 8 March 2023
An analysis is proposed of how these manoeuvres work at the cognitive and sensory level of patients, which takes account of the illusions they engender through suggestion and misdirection. I examine how such treatments are performed within practitioner patient relationships, and their dependence on public understanding of culturally sanctioned schemas of medical treatment and explanation. In deploying manipulations which make no recourse to supernatural or occult powers, pretend cures, I argue, represent an important Graeco-Roman human accomplishment.
Getting Older Film Club: SAACY Events
SAACY runs a film club on the theme of ageing, hoping to show depictions of the ageing process in all its diversity. In collaboration with the Centre for Health Humanities, our Getting Older Film Club screens a series of films on fortnightly Thursday evenings that address our idea that ageing is not something bad that happens at the end of life but a process of lifelong change. All are welcome including King’s students and staff, and SAACY project partners. For more details follow the link below:
CHH Blog: A Workshop on 'The Mouth'
On the 7 December 2022 a group of us assembled for a workshop on the topic of ‘the Mouth’, with the aim to discuss the different perspectives at play between Arts and Humanities approaches and those of the caring professions and the disciplines bearing upon them, in this case Dentistry.
Conversations across the medical humanities · Nov 2021
CHH has been facilitating conversations across departments and faculties at KCL, putting researchers in different fields into contact with one another in order to bring out new dimensions of their individual research.
Dr Tania Gergel on advance directives for mental illness
"The debate over self-binding directives has been working through these issues since the 1980s. However, one voice that was largely missing was the voice of ‘lived experience’", says Dr Tania Gergel for Psyche.co
Disability + Intersectionality Reading Group · Jul 2021
Disability+Intersectionality is a fortnightly reading group which meets to discuss key texts in critical disability studies, situating them within the broader context of the humanities and social sciences.
CHH virtual book club · Jul 2021
CHH ran a virtual book club themed around pandemics. Participants met regularly to discuss the books during the first UK lockdown, and many fascinating conversations came out of these texts.
News
Professor Dame Anne Marie Rafferty honoured in New Year's Honours List
King’s College London is proud to announce that Professor Dame Anne Marie Rafferty CBE has been nominated for a life Peerage within the House of Lords in the...
Illness changes how humans see each other, says new book
A new book by two King’s professors suggests that major illness impacts the recognition that humans give each other and proposes an alternative approach to...
Katherine McKittrick delivers Sylvia Wynter Lecture
Professor Katherine McKittrick, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen's University Canada, delivered the 2024-25 Sylvia Wynter Lecture...
Little has changed in four decades of dementia care, finds King's study
A new study has found ineffective co-ordination of services and fragmented care plans in England has resulted in very little improving for dementia carers in...
Events
SLSAeu 2025/SAACY Conference - The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies
We are excited to announce that SAACY is hosting the SLSAeu Conference at King’s College London in June 2025.
The health humanities, the critical medical humanities and the future of the field
Explore the health humanities, critical medical humanities and future of the field with Professor Neil Vickers.
Please note: this event has passed.
Narrative and the discovery of 'culture' 1980-1995
Professor Neil Vickers presents on narrative and the discovery of 'culture' in relation to the medical humanities.
Please note: this event has passed.
“In the beginning was the chaplaincy”: the religious origins of the medical humanities, 1960-1980
Join Professor Neil Vickers for an examination of the medical humanities' religious beginnings.
Please note: this event has passed.
A Lifelong Ageing Fair in London: Bringing together researchers, charities and the local community
This day-long event will be open to the public, bringing together academic researchers, third-sector organisations, and the local community around King’s and...
Please note: this event has passed.
Education
Modules in the Health Humanities
The following modules offer a sample of the opportunities available for undergraduate (levels 4,5 and 6) and taught postgraduate (level 7) students to study topics related to the health humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, subject to availability in any one year.
Department of Classics
- 5AACTL36 Ancient Sexuality I
- 6AACTL81 Classical Antiquity at the Fin de Siècle: Art, Sexuality, Religion and Madness
Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries
- 5AAIC001 Diversity Matters
- 6AAIC003 Sustainability, Care and Culture
Department of Digital Humanities
- 7AAVDC20 Digital Health
Department of English
- 5AAEB016 Literature and Psychoanalysis
- 7AAEM831 Illness Narrative as Life Writing
- 7AAEM735 Biopower: The Fate of an Idea
Department of History
- 5AAH1081: Drugs, Disease, and Demi-Gods: Health and Healing in the Early Modern World
- 6AAH3037 From the NHS to Obamacare: Health and Healthcare in British and American Life
- 6AAH4019 Bodies
- 7AAH2033/7AAH2019 The Public History of Science, Technology and Medicine
- 7AAH8012/7AAH8008 Medicine, Modernity and the Body
- 7AAH8013/7AAH8009 Ways of Knowing: Understanding the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
- 7AAFM032 ‘The Other Side of Reason’: Literature, Philosophy, Madness
- 7ABA0008 Melancholia and Hypochondria in 18th Century European Literature
Department of Philosophy
- 5AAN5001 Neuroscience and the Mind
- 7AAN2058 Philosophy of Medicine
- 7AAN2003 The Concept of Mental Disorder
Group lead
Reader in Health Humanities and Health Sciences
Contact us
Related departments
- Faculty of Arts & Humanities
- Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine
- Department of English
- Department of Philosophy
- Department of Adult Nursing
- Department of Anatomy
- Department of History
- Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience
- Department of Digital Humanities
- Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries
- Department of Classics
- Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities
- Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures