Disrupted breath, songlines of breathlessness: an interdisciplinary response

Malpass, Alice; Dodd, James; Feder, Gene; Macnaughton, Jane; Rose, Arthur; Walker, Oriana; Williams, Tina; Carel, Havi

Abstract

Health research is often bounded by disciplinary expertise. While cross-disciplinary collaborations are often forged, the analysis of data which draws on more than one discipline at the same time is underexplored. Life of Breath, a 5-year project funded by the Wellcome Trust to understand the clinical, historical and cultural phenomenology of the breath and breathlessness, brings together an interdisciplinary team, including medical humanities scholars, respiratory clinicians, medical anthropologists, medical historians, cultural theorists, artists and philosophers. While individual members of the Life of Breath team come together to share ongoing work, collaborate and learn from each other’s approach, we also had the ambition to explore the feasibility of integrating our approaches in a shared response to the same piece of textual data. In this article, we present our pluralistic, interdisciplinary analysis of an excerpt from a single cognitive interview transcript with a patient with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. We discuss the variation in the responses and interpretations of the data, why research into breathlessness may particularly benefit from an interdisciplinary approach, and the wider implications of the findings for interdisciplinary research within health and medicine.

Citation

Malpass, A., Dodd, J., Feder, G., Macnaughton, J., Rose, A., Walker, O., …Carel, H. (2019). Disrupted breath, songlines of breathlessness: an interdisciplinary response. Medical Humanities, 45(3), 294-303. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2018-011631

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 10, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Aug 22, 2019
• Publication Date: Sep 30, 2019
• Deposit Date: Aug 15, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 15, 2019
• Journal: Medical humanities.
• Print ISSN: 1468-215X
• Electronic ISSN: 1473-4265
• Publisher: BMJ Publishing Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 294-303
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2018-011631