Julie Orlemanski is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature.

I come to the medical humanities as someone who studies the Middle Ages, a period usually understood as just prior to the start of modernity—before the rise of Renaissance anatomy, before the centralized regulation of medical practice, and before the consolidation of scientific empiricism. Unsurprisingly, medieval health care was pretty different from what we have today. There was no germ theory of disease, and instead medieval physicians understood illness to arise from the imbalance of the body’s four humors, which could be affected by factors that ranged from falling in love to the position of the planets.

Despite these differences, my interest fixed on something shared by medieval and modern patients alike—the question why. Why does one person fall sick when another doesn’t? Why does a cure work in one situation but not another? In my monograph Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), I explore the interest that medieval men and women took in medical science. Between the arrival of the Black Death in England in 1348 and the emergence of books printed in English in 1473, thousands of different medical texts were copied, translated, and composed, largely for readers outside universities. I was curious about how these readers integrated medicine with other systems of explanation, including moral and spiritual ones, to make sense of their experiences of falling sick and getting well. In the same period, English poets were incorporating the language of medicine to create new models of narrative character and literary subjectivity. The popularization of medical knowledge, my book argues, effected a transformative encounter between ideas of causation and models of selfhood in medieval England.

Since I wrote Symptomatic Subjects, my research has largely shifted away from the medical humanities, but it remains one of my favorite subjects to teach. Typically, my course Literature, Medicine, and Embodiment is full of students who are thinking about careers in the health professions. Part of what makes the classroom so exciting are the experiences students bring to the poems and narratives we read—their experiences in labs, in medical internships, and at patients’ bedsides, not to mention their own family histories and personal biographies. Over the quarter, we work together to track how literature and the humanities map the limits of medical science and supplement it with alternative forms of learning, invention, testimony, and speculation. We cover the literatures of AIDS, cancer, disability, scientific racism, and science fiction—all in nine weeks!

I don’t always manage to include engagement with medieval sources, but the Middle Ages are always in the intellectual background, shaping my approach. The period has taught me that even when a patient, a people, or an epoch doesn’t seem “rational” or “modern” by the standards of contemporary medical science, they turn out in every instance to be equipped with their own sophisticated understandings of bodily suffering, the material world, and how they interact. The medical humanities are, in part, an effort to recognize and learn from such forms of knowledge.—by Julie Orlemanski

Melissa Baese-Berk is a professor in the Department of Linguistics.

I work on how people understand and produce language, especially across different kinds of communication barriers. So that might be differences in the accents people have, their language backgrounds, or noise. Figuring out how people do and don’t understand speech in these circumstances is at the heart of most of the work I do.

In 2019 the Acoustical Society of America asked me to come and talk about how speech is understood. At the end of it, one of the acoustical engineers, Erica Ryherd of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, came up and asked what I knew about how hospitals are designed. She, my colleague Tessa Bent from Indiana University, and I became interested in medically related speech in hospitals.

The World Health Organization says hospitals are too noisy worldwide—but this is true in the US in particular. Increased noise harms your ability to rest, which impacts wound healing. We’re also interested in patient-provider communication and provider-provider communication.

We have a suite of studies looking at how people perceive and understand speech in adverse listening conditions. One challenge is the vocabulary the speaker is using. Then there are the adverse conditions that result from the environment—a noise like a leaf blower going on outside your house, or a competing talker. It’s uncanny how frequently hospital administrators bring up noisy floor polishers as a problem. These are problems we don’t have great interventions for, other than “Go somewhere quieter.”

The first hospital studies we did were similar to our typical speech-perception studies. Somebody comes into our lab, they put on fancy headphones, we play them speech that is in a quiet or noisy setting, and we ask them to transcribe what they hear. We’re looking at how many words they accurately transcribe.

For older adults, we’ve noticed they have more challenges with hospital noise. One hypothesis is that younger adults are good at doing what we call glimpsing. When noise fluctuates, if you can take advantage of times when the noise is quieter, you can get a sense of what’s being said and use that to guess what else might have been said. We think older adults might be less good at that kind of task.

I really love this work. It highlights how humanists can interface with other disciplines. Architectural acousticians know a ton about acoustics but nothing about how the brain handles speech, and so being able to provide them with this information feels like a real service to their field.

Gregory Norman in the Department of Psychology and I have also been plotting to look at the questions of how noise might create stress, and how stress might impact perception of speech and noise, especially medically related speech. We don’t have a great sense of how stress impacts your ability to understand speech. This is in part because speech perception as a whole is a relatively new discipline, and most of our work has taken place in a lab. Our work is some of the first to step outside the laboratory and ask, How is this happening in the real world?—as told to Lucas McGranahan