We are pleased to offer for review ‘Hearing and the Hospital: Sound, Listening, Knowledge and Experience’ by Tom Rice (Sean Kingston Publishing, 2013). Expressions of interest are welcome from across the medical humanities.
An original ethnography of sound and listening in one of our major institutions, Hearing and the Hospital reveals the hospital to be a space in which several modes of listening are simultaneously in play and in which different layers of auditory knowledge and experience coexist.
Engaging with Sound Studies, the Anthropology of the Senses, Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies in this volume, Tom Rice shows how sound and listening produce, articulate and mediate social relations inside the hospital, how listening acquires direction and focus within that environment, and how certain sounds become endowed with particular meanings and associations. He also exposes many of the sensory minutiae that both underpin and undermine the production of medical knowledge and skill. Hearing and the Hospital creates an acoustic interrogation of hospital life, and in doing so questions accepted ideas about the sense of hearing itself.
If you would like to review ‘Hearing and the Hospital’ (no more than 1,000 words in length), then please consult our reviewer’s guidelines and email our reviews editor with a short explanation of why you are well placed to review the book.