Between the two cultures: Transdisciplinary futures for literary studies and medicine

In 1959, physicist and novelist C.P. Snow declared an irreconcilable rift between the ‘two cultures’ of the arts and sciences. In 2020, historian Nicholas Dirks declared that the two cultures still urgently needed to reconcile to solve the crisis of COVID-19. This paper argues that literary studies can play a profound role in reconnecting the cultures of the HASS and STEM disciplines. Examining the unique partnership between St George's Medical School and Birkbeck, University of London, in which academics, artists and clinicians sought radical ways to bring humanities and medical education together without reducing humanities to what Alan Bleakley calls ‘edutainment’ for medical education, or conversely, privileging he voice of critical theory over the real-life, complex experience of clinical practice. The modules developed in this partnership utilise literary texts, critical theory and clinical knowledge as source materials. Teaching medical/healthcare students alongside literature/creative writing students, with a transdisciplinary teaching team of clinicians and literary scholars, this partnership demonstrates that learning to think critically via literary studies enhances the capacities of both student cohorts. It evidences how literary studies develop clinical skills, and how clinical knowledge expands the conceptual understanding of the body and its representations in literature/creative writing students.