Linking humanities and health
The EU-funded project PSYCHOLOGY & POETICS is part of an innovative research programme at King's College Centre for the Humanities and Health in London. Two branches of German psychological thought were the main focus of the project. One is Karl Philipp Moritz's seminal Magazine for Empirical Psychology. The magazine combines aspects of psychology of language, education, and psychotherapy. The other is the phrenological tradition initiated by Franz Josef Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim. Theirs is a theory of functional localisation in the brain and a practice of diagnosis by cranial palpation. Moritz and Gall are known as founding figures of psychiatry. Both naturalised scientific observation with an emphasis on childhood memories and ordinary life. This coincides with psychological theories on the literary discourse of self-knowledge and character in Britain at the time. Gall’s and Moritz’s epistemic uses of observations challenge Michel Foucault's analysis of the rise of psychology as a discipline. Naturalised case histories were significant in a variety of disciplines including law, theology, medicine and literature. Their impact contributed to the character formation in British novels such as Dickens' David Copperfield, Pickwick Papers and Bleak House. The project has successfully designed a new strand in the Centre, that of Medical Case Histories as Genre. It conceptualises the field of Medical Humanities. This opens new doors to innovative research programmes bringing humanities together to explore important questions in the sphere of health care.
Keywords
Humanities, health, literary impact, German psychological medicine, British culture, psychology, poetics, childhood memories, health care
