Often, the medical humanities are framed as a corrective to various instrumental inclinations within biomedicine. The humanities, according to this formulation, represent a point of departure from instrumental thinking, a means by which the arts intervene to combat biomedicine’s more technological tendencies. Drawing from philosophers of technology Bernard Stiegler and Martin Heidegger, I challenge this formulation, arguing that narrative—a multidisciplinary tool of the medical humanities—is itself a tool and therefore a technology. Rather than asking if narrative is a technology, scholars within the medical humanities would be better served by asking what kind of technology we wish narrative to be. The answer that I forward—explicitly instrumental—is that narrative is a constitutive technology, a tool by which humans reinstantiate order in the wake of technological disruption. Rather than resisting technology, narrative provides a tool for responding to technological change. As biomedicine continues its own technological turn—consider, for example, the rapid development of medical applications of generative artificial intelligence and the emergence of precision medicine—such a lens has become increasingly necessary, equipping the medical field with tools to expand analysis of emerging technologies beyond the twin lenses of costliness and effectiveness.
Dominic Robin (Fri,) studied this question.