Cogent Arts & Humanities

Medicine Under Suspense: Medical Thrillers and the Biomedical Imagination

Cogent Arts & Humanities is pleased to welcome you to submit your research to the Article Collection "Medicine Under Suspense: Medical Thrillers and the Biomedical Imagination".

Medicine may appear in a thriller merely as setting or profession. In other narratives, however, biomedical knowledge, clinical institutions, bodily processes, technologies, or systems of care structure suspense itself: they determine what can be known, when certainty becomes possible, who may interpret the body, and what can happen before an answer arrives. Medicine Under Suspense examines this second condition. It proposes a provisional definition of the medical thriller as a literary, performative, visual, or audiovisual narrative in which medicine is structurally necessary to suspense, uncertainty, investigation, conflict, or affect. The Collection treats Medical Thriller Studies as a possible convergence rather than a settled field, asking whether recurring relations among diagnosis, secrecy, biological urgency, institutional opacity, bodily vulnerability, and biomedical risk show sufficient formal, historical, and cultural continuity to warrant sustained study.

Health and medical humanities have transformed the study of illness, embodiment, care, disability, authority and institutions, while crime/thriller, Gothic/horror, and science-fiction scholarship have developed rich accounts of detection, fear, risk, conspiracy, and biomedical futures. Yet these conversations remain dispersed. The Collection asks what medicine makes suspense able to do. Suspense can organize attention, control the arrival of information, establish and revise evidence, and make trust provisional; clinical time can become narrative pressure, and expertise can reassure one moment and threaten the next. Because medical uncertainty is never distributed evenly, the Collection also foregrounds gender, race, class, caste, disability, sexuality, coloniality and unequal access to care. Comparative and Global South perspectives will test rather than merely extend an Anglo-American or Western model of medical suspense.

Contributions may examine the definition and history of the medical thriller; diagnosis, detection and the body as evidence; hospitals, experimentation, pharmaceuticals and surveillance; transplantation, organ economies and scarcity; epidemics and biosecurity; reproductive and emerging biomedical technologies; medical Gothic, horror and the grotesque; disability, cure and embodied vulnerability; and colonial, postcolonial, multilingual and global forms of medical suspense. The Collection welcomes original humanities-led research on novels, short fiction, drama, film, television and streaming, comics, graphic narratives and other relevant forms, including comparative and intermedial studies. It particularly invites work that brings cultural analysis into dialogue with health humanities, disability studies, bioethics, medical anthropology, history of medicine, or science and technology studies, and work that tests, refines, challenges, or rejects the category of the medical thriller rather than presuming its stability.

Meet the Guest Advisors

Dr. Jasmine Fernandez, PhD, is an Academic Assessment Lead Specialist and Assistant Professor at the University of the People. Her recent plenary work has addressed cultural competencies in healthcare and narratives of recovery and human flourishing. She serves as Associate Editor for the Educational Assessment section of Cogent Education and has peer-review experience with Common Ground Research Networks, the Journal of Human Values, and Research and Humanities in Medical Education (RHiME).

Dr. Katharina Fürholzer, PhD, is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Her research is situated at the intersections of literary studies, medical ethics, and the Medical Humanities, with work on pathography, narrative medicine, and neurological disability. She has extensive editorial and peer-review experience across literary studies, Medical Humanities, and medical ethics, including as co-editor of Re:visit Humanities & Medicine in Dialogue.

The Guest Advisors declare no conflict of interest regarding this work.