Libow Jess, Grubbs Lindsey
Writing Program, Haverford College, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Department of Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA.
J Med Humanit. 2024 Dec;45(4):443-448. doi: 10.1007/s10912-024-09906-5. Epub 2024 Oct 15.
In this essay, we recommend Kali Fajardo-Anstine's short story "Remedies" (2019) for inclusion on health humanities syllabi based on our experiences teaching it at two undergraduate institutions. The story is drawn from Sabrina & Corina, Fajardo-Anstine's award-winning book of short stories about Chicana and Indigenous women in Colorado, but is available for free online, making it highly accessible for students. "Remedies" is narrated by Clarisa, who turns to her great-grandmother Estrella for the traditional knowledge that ultimately cures her family's recurrent outbreaks of lice. As a health narrative that centers familial and cultural healing practices, "Remedies" offers a much needed counterpart to the biomedical frameworks that tend to dominate health humanities syllabi and curricula. At the same time that it illuminates the physical and emotional efficacy of such practices, "Remedies" rejects a binary that pits them against biomedicine, offering a complex portrait of how various members of a family integrate traditional and biomedical approaches to health. We discuss how themes related to familial and cultural healing practices are developed in the story and introduce our approach to initiating productive conversations about the relationship between traditional healing and biomedicine in our classrooms.
在本文中,基于我们在两所本科院校讲授卡利·法贾尔多 - 安斯汀的短篇小说《疗法》(2019年)的经验,我们推荐将其纳入健康人文学科教学大纲。这个故事取材于法贾尔多 - 安斯汀获奖的短篇小说集《萨布丽娜与科琳娜》,该小说集讲述了科罗拉多州的奇卡诺和原住民女性的故事,而《疗法》可在网上免费获取,学生很容易就能读到。《疗法》由克拉丽莎叙述,她向曾祖母埃斯特雷拉寻求传统知识,最终治愈了家人反复出现的虱子问题。作为一个以家庭和文化治疗实践为中心的健康叙事,《疗法》为往往主导健康人文学科教学大纲和课程的生物医学框架提供了急需的补充。在阐明这些实践的身体和情感功效的同时,《疗法》摒弃了将它们与生物医学对立起来的二元论,展现了一个家庭的不同成员如何将传统和生物医学的健康方法结合起来的复杂图景。我们将讨论故事中与家庭和文化治疗实践相关的主题是如何展开的,并介绍我们在课堂上就传统治疗与生物医学之间的关系展开富有成效的讨论的方法。