Description:

Catherine Belling, PhD
Associate Professor
Medical Humanities and Bioethics
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Morbid Curiosity: Horror in Medicine

The word “horror” is usually associated with sensationalism, irrationality, and gratuitous excess. While the content of horror stories and movies is very similar to the subject matter of medicine (e.g. bodily damage, disease, and abnormality; death and dying; gore), the discourses of medicine seem to work hard to keep horror contained, even repressed. This talk considers horror as an emotional and moral response as well as a genre and, taking as its groundwork the analysis of a PubMed search for the term “horror," explores health care's need both to resist and to represent the morbid realities that at once justify and disturb its work.