A mint of skill fiction incorporate medicine — be it realistic , fantastic , futuristically biography - enhancing , or horrific . A young project at Scotland ’s University of Glasgow , dubbed “ Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities , ” aims to contemplate originative visual sense of medical care , and one crowdsourced aspect of it need your help .
Anna McFarlane , one of the academic work out under Dr. Gavin Miller at the university ’s Medical Humanities Research Centre in its School of Critical Studies , contacted io9 to see if our readers — who are , you know , slightly obsess with science fiction — would lend a hand . “ I believe it will be interesting to some io9 readers , both those who are concerned in [ scifi ] as critics or academics , and more casual readers who might be interested in making sure that some of their favorite medical skill fiction media establish it into the database , ” she writes .
Here ’s more from McFarlane about the project , which is still very much in its former stages ( as of this writing , it only had six entries under “ motion moving-picture show ” ) .
In less than two years we ’ll find ourselves celebrating the bicentennial of Mary Shelley ’s Frankenstein a novel that , in the view of many science fiction generator and critics , bulge out the genre that we now lie with as science fiction . Shelley ’s mash - up ofcutting - edge aesculapian technologywith long time - old philosophic concern strike a chord with readers and has never gone unread for long . But what does this close family relationship between medicine and the nascence of skill fable secernate us ?
In recent long time looking at the connections between medicine and world subjects , like literature or film written report , has become relatively coarse . Some university aesculapian programmes recognize that the work of the humanities can have an significant persona to toy in take people to become Dr. or nurse , as theNarrative Medicinecourse at Columbia University exhibit , or the University of Edinburgh’sLiterature and Medicine modulewhich leave medical officer - in - training to look at how illness and treatment have been described in lit , both fabrication and non - fabrication .
However , despite science fabrication ’s close human relationship with medicine there has n’t been much of an effort to explore the connections between scientific discipline fable and the medical humanities . In 2002 skill fiction academic Gary Westfahl and George Slusser did produce a aggregation calledNo Cure For the Futurethat catalogued the way in which medicine has appeared in science fiction literature , but aside from this there has been very little geographic expedition and analysis . In theScience Fiction and the Medical Humanities labor , funded by the Wellcome Trust and based at the University of Glasgow , myself and Dr Gavin Miller have been doing our best to redress this oversight by demand not just what science fiction can do for aesculapian practitioners , but what it can do for our engagement with the medical establishment .
canvass skill fiction can help medico to face ethical issue , such as the possibility of reanimation in Frankenstein . skill fiction necessitate the enquiry ‘ what if ? ’ which can aid to think about ethics in a more humanist way : what if we could give someone super big businessman by depriving them of oxygen , as happened to Deadpool ? Or by feed in their female parent LSD like Eleven in Stranger Things ? What if wealthy people had perfect and pure access to healthcare while the 99 % hurt as in Elysium ? All of these question can aid people involved in the aesculapian industry to think about the event of their actions , and how medicine might develop in the future .
But science fiction studies can also be enriched by claim the skills of a science fable scholarly person and applying them to the practice session and societal realness of the medical brass . We can discourse what ’s happening when a pharmaceutic troupe draws on utopian language to advance its endeavours . We can read the political objectives inexplicit in the focal point of medical provision . We can demand whether aesculapian engineering is helping the disabled community or treat them as subjects that ask to be ‘ fixed ’ , as Kathryn Allen and Djibril al - Ayad do in their forgetful story collectionAccessing the Future . Through this kind of critical thought process science fiction author and scholars can do what they do best ; challenge the status quo by ask ‘ what if things were unlike ? ’
To make this project as successful as it can be we ’re ask for service from the whole scientific discipline fiction community . We ’re building a database of scientific discipline fiction novel , short stories , picture show , and television demo that deal with medical issues and we ’ve open it up to contributors so that we can crowdsource as complete a tilt as potential . In the future tense we hope that this database will be used as a imagination for academician to find entropy about medical scientific discipline fiction texts , but hopefully it ’ll also be an inspiration to non - academics , a place where anyone can derive to see the ways that skill fiction has tested the boundaries of aesculapian technology and medical ethic . It will hopefully add to a conversation that has to admit us all since the field of medicament is the place where we come most intimately into contact with the futurity and its engineering science .
Contributing to the database is well-to-do — just maneuver to the “ Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities ” internet site , record , and start adding away .
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