Dear H-Madness readers,
A new edited volume has just been published. Edited by Marta-Laura Cenedese and Clio Nicastro, it adopts a multidisciplinary approach to explore the complex relationships between violence, care, cure, and the self in the medical field. Several chapters specifically address issues related to psychiatry.
The book is partially available in open access. Below are the abstract from the publisher’s website and the table of contents.

“This book explores the notions of violence, care, and cure within the medical encounter and seeks to foreground the ways in which, whether individually or as a triad, they are prone to ambiguous interpretations. The chapters of this book attend to the complex interlacing of these three key terms and what to make of their entanglement by offering historical, practical, philosophical, personal, and aesthetic analyses of different medical scenes, objects, and concepts.

Besides the three main concepts that give the collection its title, the volume deals with bodily experience, medical neglect or scepticism, pain and suffering, diagnosis and recovery, and epistemic injustice, through the lens of, among others, biopolitics, ethics, gender medicine, and critical medical humanities. Altogether, the chapters pay particular attention to the role of images and other narratives, including social media platforms. The case studies in this collection invite the reader to observe medical encounters that take place in and are shaped by a variety of both material and ‘immaterial’ spaces, from the consulting room to the antechamber of medical bureaucracy, and from artistic venues to biopolitical discourses. Taken together, this book argues that a hermeneutic of violence, care, and cure is inseparable from individual and collective perceptions of the medical encounter; that is, it is inextricable from an understanding of the tensions and consensus that surge among perceptions orchestrated by both internal (subjective) and external (social, cultural, political) ‘gazes’. Moreover, the volume aims to provide, both directly and indirectly, a meta‑eflection on the disciplines that fall under the umbrella of ‘medical and health humanities’, interrogating the field’s potential to unearth systemic bias, to open different possibilities of existence, and to make visible the complexity of its research objects, as well as to caution against their possible pitfalls.

By bringing together different methodological approaches, this volume provides its readers with conceptual resources for thinking about the intersections of violence, care, and cure. By providing a space where the voices of both emerging and established scholars mingle and respond to one another, this book will be essential reading for anyone across the social sciences and humanities interested in the sociology of health and medicine, the medical humanities, and gender studies”.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Violence, Care, Cure: (Self-)Perceptions Within the Medical Encounter

Marta-Laura Cenedese and Clio Nicastro

Musing 1: Narrative Medicine, Racial Justice and The Black Maternal Mortality Crisis

Mita Banerjee

Part 1: Medical Histories and Biopolitics

1. Touching Matters of Care: A Visual Approach to Care and Violence in Dr Marie Stopes’ Birth Control Campaign

Nora Heidorn

2. Politics In the Time of Cholera: COVID, Table Manners, and Bio-Politics

Federico Dal Bo

3. Bio-Story: Michel Foucault and The History of Social Medicine

Xenia Chiaramonte

Musing 2: Counteracting Psychiatric Violence Through Critical Heritage Studies and Cooperation

Elisabeth Punzi, Helen Johansson, and Annica Engström

Part 2: Unsettling and Working Through Practices and Languages of Cure

4. The ‘Interpretation Workshop’ As Artistic Research: A Methodological Approach to Original Biographical National Socialist Writings

Lena Ditte Nissen

5. ‘The Way Out Is Via the Door’: R.D. Laing and the Cure from The Family

Janina Klement

6. ‘Io Sono Matta’: Psychiatric Violence, Militant Madness, and Sexual Difference in Alberto Grifi’s ‘Anthropology of Disobedience’

Sophia Rohwetter

7. The Denied Poetics of Global Psychiatry and Frantz Fanon’s Poetisation of Science

Lisa Schmidt-Herzog

Musing 3: Fanon, Epistemic Injustice, and the Colonial Medical Encounter

Daniele Lorenzini

Part 3: Agency in Illness and Ethics of Suffering                  

8. Narrative Autonomy to The Test of Illness

Silvia Pierosara

9. Plumbing The Perpetual Loss of Paradise: Susan Taubes and Sacred Suffering

Rachel Pafe

10. Almodóvar’s Anatomies

Hannah Parlett

Musing 4: On Care and Violence in Medical Humanities Research Collaborations

Angela Woods

Part 4: Anatomy of a Transformation

11. T For Trans: An Outraged Investigation of Non-Binary Medical Transition in Germany

Claude Kempen

12. I Am Not My MRI

Maria Morata

13. Surprised By the Night: On the Traversal of a Dysphoric Phantasy

Myriam Sauer

14. Afterword: Moral Value in Medicine: Violence, Cure, and Care

Sander L. Gilman