THE ACADEMIC SEPARATION of the sciences and the humanities makes it difficult to explore the connection between the various aspects of the human condition, not least in the discipline of medicine. Even though medicine is not a hard science per se but an interpretive approach that combines scientific and humanities-based modes of knowledge and therefore also experiences what Catherine Belling has called the “hermeneutic anxiety” that informs humanities research, it is firmly located among other science buildings whose literal and figurative gates are jealously guarded. The current academic focus on evidence-based medicine further increases the distance between medicine and humanities-based approaches to the human body by implying that the humanities do not produce real evidence. At the same time, calls for narrowing this distance are intensifying. Reestablishing the connection between the humanities and the sciences has become more important than ever because of global processes of corporatization that affect both health care institutions and universities. Cost efficiency in medical education has made it increasingly difficult to offer courses that focus on the human aspect of medicine within the medical curriculum itself. At the same time, the perceived crisis in the humanities has encouraged literary scholars to emphasize that their work is not a self-referential field of inquiry but that it engages broad social and political processes. As a result of the convergence of these two trends, the need for interdisciplinary spaces in teaching and research has grown over the past years.

The most forceful calls for bridging disciplinary divides already occurred in the 1970s, when the practice of “literature and medicine” gained ground as a reaction to the transformation of medical schools into high-powered research centers in the previous decade. As Anne Hudson Jones outlines, Edmund Pellegrino called upon medical educators to refocus their attention on the moral dimension of medicine. At the same time, Joanne Trautmann Banks highlighted the necessity of “read[ing], in the fullest sense” in order to increase medical practitioners’ “tolerance for ambiguity” with the goal of improving patient care. With the establishment of the journal Literature and Medicine in 1982, these interdisciplinary endeavors found a home.