Disease-stricken Bodies and Land: Care Ethics in Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed

Abstract

The term health humanities refers to the transdisciplinary engagement of medical sciences with arts and humanities that focusses on an interdisciplinary approach to explore and investigate the deep impact of illness on patients as well as their caretakers by applying humanistic perspectives to healthcare. As human wellbeing means a holistic and comprehensive state, it is a humane healthcare that is needed, where impairment, suffering and illness should be considered as human experiences, rather than a bio-medical reductionism of patients. Arts can assist healthcare professionals in reflecting upon the condition of human beings, apart from the scientific and medical analysis of the illness. Also literature that deals with any kind of illness, psychological or physical, plays a decisive role in shaping the public perceptions regarding those diseases. The present paper tries to explore how care practice and care ethics can be a healing force in our society, which is torn apart by several calamities and wars. It analyses the healthcare approach and care ethics as portrayed in the novel And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan born US based writer, famous for his portrayal of Afghan culture and history.