For nineteenth-century British novels, illness did not exist just within the individual body; illness occurred at the level of communities. Responding to and building upon contemporary medicine’s focus on the social contexts of disease, novels of this era enlarge their plot structures to include more characters, more relationships, and more scopes of action than existed in novels before this century. In nineteenth-century novels, the collective experience of illness can be as intimate as the bonds between a sufferer and a caregiver or as diffuse as a global pandemic. In any case, illness revealed one’s embeddedness in larger structures of meaning. The formal characteristics of Victorian novels offer ways for critical medical humanities today to envision the social ties involved in the illness experience.

What might the medical humanities be capable of doing?’ asked Viney, Callard, and Woods in their 2015 call for a critical medical humanities. This chapter endeavours to answer that question by investigating how ‘the literary’ is mobilized in health-focused projects whose commitment to interdisciplinary entanglement renders them exemplary of the field’s critical turn. We interviewed seven UK-based literary studies scholars about their work in two or more such projects in order to understand how ‘the literary’ (as discipline, approach, and praxis) features within project design and delivery, the roles taken up by the literary studies scholar, and the consequent effects on shared understandings about the functions of the literary text. One of the most striking findings of this exploratory study was the interviewees’ determination for the literary text to be considered in non-representational terms and concurrent commitment to championing novel articulations of the value and ‘use’ of literary endeavour.