Des Fitzgerald is Co-Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory at UCC. His research aims to explore the connections between the humanities and the biological sciences. His most recent books are The City of Today is a Dying Thing (Faber & Faber, 2025) and The Urban Brain (Princeton University Press, 2023).
In a much-cited paper in 2015, Will Viney, Felicity Callard and Angela woods asked, “What can the medical humanities achieve?” While medical humanities has often been held up as a highly successful new sub-field, with its own teaching programmes, journals, and funding streams, Viney and his colleagues argued that the field’s ongoing institutionalization had come at the expense of a set of normalizing assumptions about what the two poles that comprise the core term – “medical” and “humanities” – can do, and how they interact. They thus called for a displacement of the ‘medical’ beyond its clinical instantiations; for greater attention to the operations of biomedical culture; for a stronger connection to adjacent subfields such as critical, disability and queer theory; and for a committed undoing of the ‘service model’ that attached humanities research to a subordinate role in collaborative projects.
In this talk, moving outward rom these proposals, I want to ask what a more critical medical humanities might look like in the Irish context, and what it would mean for our field to adopt a more firmly critical stance. While this talk does not try to establish a programmatic agenda, I will set out what I consider to be some critical topoi for any such development. These include: the central role of private medicine in Ireland, including a culture of profiteering by clinicians, and the deliberate structuring of the health system around inequalities of access; the economic role of international biomedical capitalism in Ireland, especially in relation to the pharmaceutical and medical devices industries; the comparatively conservative nature of the medical profession and medical education in Ireland, even by international standards, and especially in relation to the intersection of health with questions of sex and gender; our field’s relatively weak investment in understanding pathogenic social structures as these play out in contemporary Ireland, such as poor housing, racism, and migrant rights; and the uncritically applied ‘stem’ focus of research funding structures in Ireland and generalised hostility to critical, collaborative work.
