INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH CULTURE SOCIETY

Medicine and wellness today encompass a totally different meaning than they did before. These are not merely ways of driving away diseases and illness but also help us in creating a safe and healthy environment that nurtures not only our body, but also mind and soul. Medical humanities has emerged as an interdisciplinary field that integrates arts, literature, ethics, history, and social sciences (like sociology, anthropology, philosophy) with medicine to understand the human experience of health and illness, focusing on patient care, professional development, and holistic healing beyond just biological facts. This paper offers a Medical Humanities reading of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, arguing that the novel constructs illness not as a purely biological condition but as a historically and politically produced state. Through the grotesquely accelerated aging and bodily deformity of its narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, Rushdie transforms the human body into a site where colonial violence, communal conflict, and capitalist excess are materially inscribed. Drawing on Arthur Kleinman’s distinction between illness and disease and Michel Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze, the paper demonstrates how Moor’s body cannot be adequately explained within biomedical frameworks because its pathology emerges from social and historical trauma rather than physiological malfunction. The Zogoiby family’s genealogy of degeneration further reveals how power, wealth, and political corruption operate as forms of intergenerational pathology, producing bodies that are simultaneously biologically and morally unstable. In this sense, Rushdie presents the nation itself as a diseased organism, with Bombay functioning as a polluted, feverish urban body afflicted by communalism, organized crime, and neoliberal predation. The novel’s excessive, fragmented narrative style mirrors the logic of illness testimony, positioning storytelling as a mode of survival and resistance against bodily and historical disintegration. By reading The Moor’s Last Sigh through the lens of Medical Humanities, this paper shows how Rushdie challenges the reduction of suffering to medical abnormality and instead frames illness as an embodied form of postcolonial memory. Ultimately, the novel reveals that in postcolonial modernity, bodies do not merely fall ill; rather, they bear the accumulated wounds of history itself.