Medical & Health Humanities Africa (MHHA) is a new open network which aims to bring practitioners and researchers across Africa together to develop work in this area, and to provide information on related initiatives across the world.
You can read more about the network in the BMJ Medical Humanities special issue Medical Humanities in Africa (December 2018).
Much of the work that has surfaced in this area has until very recently been located in North America, Europe and the UK. We aim to build an online resource and mailing list for people interested or working in in Africa in areas where issues relating to medicine and health meet the social sciences and the arts.
We take as a starting point Pattison’s 2003 ‘vision of medical humanities’ as
a loose coalition of concerns, people, disciplines, approaches, practices, and methods that are engaged in a fairly open ended dialogue and exploration of where humanities approaches etc can be illuminative of, or even obstructive to, health and health care.
We are also interested in the concept of ‘rigorous improvisation‘ or ‘disciplined curiosity‘ as a way of approaching this intersection between disciplines.
This site has tabs for events we think might be of interest, as well as a resource for literature, case studies, and project links.
Please feel free to browse the site and comment on the content.
To find out more about MHHA, please contact us.
The network first formed in 2012 as a partnership between Medical Humanities programmes at WiSER (University of the Witwatersrand) and the University of Cape Town. The group now includes partners from Stellenbosch University, the University of the Western Cape and the University of Pretoria. This is an open network, however, not affiliated to any one institution but created as a resource for practitioners and researchers.
Reference
Pattison, S. (2003) ‘Medical Humanities: A vision and some cautionary notes’ BMJ Medical Humanities 29:1 37-38 doi:10.1136/mh.29.1.37
Medical and Health Humanities Africa 