And the Flesh in Between: Towards a Health Semiotics

AbstractThe call for a biosemiotic perspective within medical semiotics has been steadily increasing over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Johnathan Hope, and the nine contributions in their edited volume boldly seek to bridge the segregation between nature and culture in the medical sciences as well as in the medical humanities. To a large extent, they achieve this aim by explicating the sign relations in food and medicine, the sign relations of medical theory and practice, and the sign relations between the biology in medicine and medicine of society. Taking up a semio-historical approach, I contextualize two select contributions from Hendlin and Hope’s Food and Medicine with the medical semiotics of the Hippocratic tradition. By comparing the biological semiotics from the contributions to the medical semiotics from the Corpus, I critically explicate the ways in which biosemiotics moves this subdiscipline forward and why the perspective is significant not only for the health of humans, but also for the health of other animals, and indeed for the health of the planet that we all inhabit together. On these grounds, I propose a turn from medical semiotics to health semiotics. This program for semiotics would encompass not only food and medicine, but also lifestyle and wellbeing, as well as the subjective, qualitative perspectivism that makes biosemiotics frontier research, thereby constituting a biosemioethics and promoting a semiotic fitness.