Professor Jane Desmond: "When the Patient is a Dog:  Prospects for a More-than-Human Medical Humanities"

Professor Jane Desmond: "When the Patient is a Dog:  Prospects for a More-than-Human Medical Humanities"

Based on fieldwork over multiple years in a veterinary teaching hospital, this paper analyzes some of the foundational differences between the practice of medicine for animals and that for humans, and argues that what seems on the surface to be quite similar is in fact a fundamentally different practice shaped by key factors of value, economics, and the production of knowledge and prestige.  Based on this work I then begin to ask how expanding the purview of the (human) medical humanities, with its focus on narrative medicine, agency, and subjectivity, might be transformed when we embrace the "more-than-human" turn in the humanities.