David Meltzer
David Meltzer
Fanny L. Pritzker Professor; Chief, Section of Hospital Medicine; Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy
University of Chicago
Research Project
The Case of the Human II: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject
Project Team:
2025 – 2027
Paul Klee, A Woman for Gods, 1938 (detail).
Key Question
What new knowledge about humanity can be produced through focused collaboration between humanists and medical experts?
Project Summary
Medical and humanistic understandings of health and well-being have intersected in recent decades, but the category of “the human” continues to be defined and applied in different ways. This project will identify a more holistic understanding of “the human” that is neither primarily medical nor humanistic, generating critically and clinically innovative knowledge.
Between the humanities and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from differing perspectives and with different political implications. In recent decades, these disparate fields have built a tentative and growing dialogue. However, truly multidisciplinary research between the two remains rare. The Case of the Human is an ambitious collaborative project aimed not merely at translating existing theory across humanities and medical epistemologies, but rather at co-producing new, plural knowledge of the human that transcends epistemological boundaries. The project addresses the core questions: “What is the human?” and “What does the category of the human do?” The research team aims to create novel, multidisciplinary, and pluralistic knowledge on the human along three important axes: the human as body, as social, and as subject. We will achieve this goal through three key aims, each involving specific outputs: 1) co-developing novel, plural knowledge on the human through two working conferences (one of which was held during the first phase of the project), with distribution as a case-series in The Lancet; 2) establishing the University of Chicago as a hub in global medical humanities networks through a medical humanities institution-building conference, and convening Visiting Fellows to implement, refine, and disseminate, our novel interdisciplinary methodology; and 3) a visual artistic exploration the human and the case form through student artistic workshops and a graphic medicine exhibition. We seek to advance this project’s innovative scholarship that began with the Neubauer Collegium by scaling up its successes of interdisciplinary collaborations and centering artistic understandings of the human.
Research Team
Eugene Raikhel
Eugene Raikhel
Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development; Faculty Chair, Health and Society Minor
University of Chicago
Brian Callender
Brian Callender
Adult Specialist, Hospital Medicine; Associate Professor of Medicine
University of Chicago
E. Summerson Carr
E. Summerson Carr
Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
Julie Orlemanski
Michele Friedner
Michele Friedner
Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago
Seth Holmes
Seth Holmes
Chancellor's Professor, Division of Society and Environment, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management
UC Berkeley
Mayssa Rekhis
Mayssa Rekhis
Lecturer and Researcher, School of Public Health and Community Medicine
University of Gothenburg
Mirko Pasquini
Mirko Pasquini
Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology, School of Global Studies
University of Gothenburg
Scott Stonington
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