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Humanities
Special Issues
Literature and Health in the 21st Century
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Literature and Health in the 21st Century

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2026 | Viewed by 1990

Editors

Dr. Anita Wohlmann

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Culture and Language, University of Southern Denmark, 5230 Odense, Denmark
Interests: anglophone literature; narrative medicine; medical and health humanities
Dr. Anders Juhl Rasmussen

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark
Interests: Danish and Nordic literature; narrative medicine; medical- and health humanities

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

What is the use of literature in view of today’s health challenges? This Special Issue focuses on the European region and invites papers that explore current challenges in health, well-being, and healthcare as represented in literature. The challenges, we see, are plenty: growing social inequality and political polarization with effects on public health, including various kinds of addiction; decreasing trust in science and institutions impacting vaccination programs; the multiple causes of migration, which require new competences in culture and language; a focus on fertility and the care of older citizens in response to demographic changes; fast-paced lives and unattainable ideals on social media that have been correlated with mental stress and psychiatric illnesses; the ethics of using artificial intelligence in health care; the increasingly tangible impact of climate change; and, last but not least, a present risk of new pandemics. By literature, we understand reading and writing, visible in book form, on walls and screens, in academia, in the clinic, and with vulnerable people. How have European writers in the 21st century explored these contemporary challenges as they impact health, well-being, and health care, and can facilitated activities of creative writing and shared reading in some ways support those solutions? Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Empathy, compassion, and justice in healthcare;
  • Stigma and stereotypes (e.g., migrants, ethnic minorities, transgendered persons);
  • Access to public health care;
  • Psychiatric diagnosis (e.g., autism, depression, schizophrenia);
  • Mental health of adolescents;
  • Dependency (e.g., alcohol, drugs);
  • Vaccination programs;
  • Reproductive health and aging;
  • Suicide related to A.I.;
  • Climate anxiety;
  • Pandemics (e.g., COVID-19).

Dr. Anita Wohlmann
Dr. Anders Juhl Rasmussen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • literature
  • medical humanities
  • health humanities
  • narrative medicine

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 245 KB  
Article
Living the Life of No One: Electroconvulsive Treatment as Mnemonic Metaphor
by Linus Nicolaj Carlsen
Humanities 2026, 15(8), 115; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15080115 - 14 Aug 2026
Viewed by 121
Abstract
The article investigates how electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is represented in the following four literary works of the 21st century: October’s Child, Store Kongensgade 23, The Parakeet, and I Am What I Remember. The article argues that electroconvulsive therapy is treated [...] Read more.
The article investigates how electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is represented in the following four literary works of the 21st century: October’s Child, Store Kongensgade 23, The Parakeet, and I Am What I Remember. The article argues that electroconvulsive therapy is treated as a mnemonic metaphor that highlights not just its significance for individual experiences of memory loss following treatment and how such treatment elicits traumas that span generations, but also how ECT can be said to have a gendered bias. The article attempts to show how the practice of ECT is emblematic of a certain patriarchal tendency within psychiatry that obfuscates women’s chance of being heard. It makes the argument that ECT as a metaphor paradoxically works as a narrative catalyst that forces a practice of remembrance, and that this practice is in many ways a feminist project. As such, it offers a critical insight into psychiatric practices and shows the importance of giving voice to those who suffer from after-effects of psychiatric treatment. Finally, the article argues that ECT is a feminized metaphor that continues a figurative line of thought in Western social imagination, which entangles women, technology, and mental illness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Health in the 21st Century)
20 pages, 301 KB  
Article
Healing Machines? Medical Technology and Notions of Personhood in Two Swiss Hospital Narratives (Diggelmann, Ulrich)
by Mona Baie and Martina King
Humanities 2026, 15(8), 114; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15080114 - 14 Aug 2026
Viewed by 165
Abstract
This article examines the narrative representation of high-technology clinical spaces and their challenging effects on the personhood of patient-protagonists in two Swiss hospital narratives: Walter Matthias Diggelmann’s Schatten (1979), a fictionalized autopathography on lung cancer, and Ulrike Ulrich’s Hinter den Augen (2013), which [...] Read more.
This article examines the narrative representation of high-technology clinical spaces and their challenging effects on the personhood of patient-protagonists in two Swiss hospital narratives: Walter Matthias Diggelmann’s Schatten (1979), a fictionalized autopathography on lung cancer, and Ulrike Ulrich’s Hinter den Augen (2013), which narrates an MRI examination. Combining classical narratology with the narratology of space, the paper delineates a shift from the twentieth- to the twenty-first-century text that moves from a critical representation of technologized hospital space as an antagonistic environment to a nuanced embrace of medical technology that intricately intertwines the machine and the self. As the analyses show, this shift from opposition to embrace of technology is accompanied and engendered by distinct structural characteristics: While both texts work with artistic forms of representing inner states, such as internal monologue and unreliable narration, their respective ‘poetics of the high-tech hospital’ diverge significantly, from a fundamentally dichotomous semantic setup (Diggelmann) to an integrative narrative based on formal mimesis (Ulrich). Focusing on how literary prose uniquely renders the experience of increasingly technologized hospital landscapes, the article contributes to literary scholarship at the intersection of the medical humanities, the cultural history of the hospital, and science and technology studies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Health in the 21st Century)
16 pages, 329 KB  
Article
Hypodiegetic Witnessing and Relational Knowledge of Schizophrenia in Dominique Laporte’s Mon Fils, Schizophrène and Josie Méndez-Negrete’s A Life on Hold
by David Lombard
Humanities 2026, 15(8), 108; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15080108 - 5 Aug 2026
Viewed by 149
Abstract
This article argues that parental memoirs of schizophrenia are fruitful sites for producing relational knowledge, a form of understanding that emerges through interactions among care recipients, caregivers, and clinicians rather than residing in any single epistemic agent. It analyzes Dominique Laporte’s Mon fils, [...] Read more.
This article argues that parental memoirs of schizophrenia are fruitful sites for producing relational knowledge, a form of understanding that emerges through interactions among care recipients, caregivers, and clinicians rather than residing in any single epistemic agent. It analyzes Dominique Laporte’s Mon fils, schizophrène and Josie Méndez-Negrete’s A Life on Hold as parental memoirs that narrativize knowledge about schizophrenia that often remain absent from clinical accounts. Building on the notions of narrative multiplicity and epistemic justice, the article shows how these memoirs redistribute epistemic authority across perspectives (psychiatrists’, caregivers’, and care recipients’). The article situates Laporte’s text as a testimonial memoir and Méndez-Negrete’s as an autoethnographic memoir, highlighting how both construct knowledge through caregiving. To account for their narrative strategies, it introduces the concept of hypodiegetic witnessing, which draws on Arthur Frank’s concept of witnessing and Mieke Bal’s theory of hypodiegetic narrative. Through storytelling practices such as pláticas, cuentos, intertextual references, and embedded stories, these memoirs mediate psychotic experience without claiming direct access to it. Rather than merely representing caregiving, parental memoirs generate and circulate relational knowledge, contributing to more epistemically just and polyphonic understandings of schizophrenia and mental illness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature and Health in the 21st Century)
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