RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Disrupted breath, songlines of breathlessness: an interdisciplinary response
JF Medical Humanities
JO J Med Humanit
FD BMJ Publishing Group Ltd and Institute of Medical Ethics
SP 294
OP 303
DO 10.1136/medhum-2018-011631
VO 45
IS 3
A1 Alice Malpass
A1 James Dodd
A1 Gene Feder
A1 Jane Macnaughton
A1 Arthur Rose
A1 Oriana Walker
A1 Tina Williams
A1 Havi Carel
YR 2019
UL http://mh.bmj.com/content/45/3/294.abstract
AB 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.