This authoritative new handbook offers a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the state of the medical humanities globally, showing how clinically oriented medical humanities, the critical study of medicine as a global historical and cultural phenomenon, and medicine as a force for cultural change can inform each other.

Composed of eight parts, the Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities looks at the medical humanities as:

• a network and system
• therapeutic
• provocation
• forms of resistance
• a way of reconceptualising the medical curriculum
• concerned with performance and narrative
• mediated by artists as diagnosticians of culture through public engagement.

This book describes how the medical humanities can be used in and out of clinical settings, acting as a point of resistance, redistributing medicine's capital amongst its stakeholders, embracing the complexity of medical instances, shaping medical education, promoting interdisciplinary understandings and recognising an identity for the medical humanities as a network effect. This book is an essential read for all students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in the medical humanities.