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  • Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography by Mita Banerjee
  • Sam Allen Wright (bio)
Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography Mita Banerjee Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018, xv + 390 pp. ISBN 978-3825369064, $71.00 hardback.

Mita Banerjee's 2018 Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography begins with an intriguing question: what happens if we revisit the relationship between the humanities and the medical humanities by asking "not only what the humanities can do for medicine but also what medicine can do for the humanities" (33)? Relying on the premise that medical humanities scholars have borrowed methodology and texts from the humanities without giving anything back, Banerjee turns her attention to examining what the humanities can learn from the medical humanities. Banerjee asks, "If the humanities have 'exported' some of their methodologies in order to create the field of 'medical humanities,' what happens to the humanities in the process?" (1). Reassessing where the humanities—particularly literary and cultural studies—stand in relation to the sciences after the advent of the medical humanities is a unique approach and offers a new examination of the transdisciplinary relationship between the arts and sciences. Banerjee's book is ambitious; by questioning these interdisciplinary relationships, she attempts to bridge and explore connections between several large fields, American Studies, life writing, narrative medicine, and the medical humanities. Although Banerjee raises some intriguing and important questions about the relationship between the humanities, life sciences, and the medical humanities, Medical Humanities in American Studies does its best work examining life writing, and throughout the text, Banerjee makes compelling arguments for the expansion of life writing in relation to the medical humanities.

Medical Humanities in American Studies comes at a key time for the medical [End Page 873] humanities. In recent years, several important books have been published, paving the way for an expansion of the medical humanities and drawing connections between medicine, literature, and art. Edinburgh University Press, for example, has published two influential texts in recent years that have shaped the future of the medical humanities. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (2016) reimagines the medical humanities and argues for moving beyond the patient-healthcare provider relationship in order to critically analyze the medical humanities in conjunction with medicine, art, and the social sciences. Edinburgh University Press also released Stella Bolaki's Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (2016), which examines the variety of ways illness narratives can be told, such as through art, photography, and theater. Both of these texts argued that the medical humanities is at a crossroads, and that to continue to develop the field, scholars need to expand the bounds of the field through interdisciplinary connections, methodology, and texts. Although Banerjee does not directly reference either of these books, her work contributes to the future of the medical humanities by exploring autobiographical texts about illness/disability through a transdisciplinary lens.

By far, the book's greatest strength is Banerjee's close readings of a wide range of both conventional and unconventional autobiographical texts. By arguing that texts ranging from memoirs to modern dance can all reflect the author's experience with illness and/or disability, Banerjee interrogates the very definition of autobiography. Although she is not the first to argue for unconventional illness and/or disability narratives (Bolaki's Illness as Many Narratives, for example), Banerjee's book excels in thoroughly examining texts in need of scholarship. For example, in Chapter 8, "Blue Hawaii? Adam Horowitz's Film Nuclear Savage and Collective Life Writing in the Pacific," Banerjee studies "the writing of collective lives" (275) through a documentary about nuclear testing done in the Pacific in the 1950s. Moreover, the first three chapters focus on autism spectrum disorder and examine three quite different works: eleven-year old Tito Mukhopadhyay's narrative Beyond the Silence: My Life, the World and Autism (2000), the Bollywood film My Name is Khan (2010), and Temple Grandin's memoir Thinking in Pictures (2006). Banerjee also explores other traditional memoirs, such as actor Michael J. Fox's books on Parkinson's...

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