Breath is invisible and yet ever present and vital for living beings. The concept of invisibility in relation to breath operates in concrete and metaphorical ways to extend ideas about breath and breathlessness across disciplines, in clinical spaces and in life experience. Using a critical medical humanities approach, I demonstrate that the poverty of narrative accounts and language for breath outside the health context have had a crucial influence enabling clinically mediated interpretations and accounts to dominate. These third-person accounts are important in the articulation of the ‘lived body’, but I balance this with a consideration of the subjective sensation of interoception, which has important implications for the visibility of breathlessness in both clinical and lay contexts. This article illustrates the rich potential of the subjects of breath and breathlessness within body studies and this special issue is a key step in making breath such an emergent topic.

中文翻译：

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使呼吸可见：批判医学人文学科中身体、呼吸和世界之间关系的思考

呼吸是无形的，但对生物来说却是永远存在和至关重要的。与呼吸相关的隐形概念以具体和隐喻的方式运作，以跨学科、临床空间和生活经验扩展有关呼吸和呼吸困难的概念。使用批判性医学人文方法，我证明了健康背景之外的叙事叙述和呼吸语言的贫乏具有至关重要的影响，使临床中介的解释和叙述占据主导地位。这些第三人称叙述在“活体”的表达中很重要，但我通过考虑内感受的主观感觉来平衡这一点，这对临床和非专业背景下呼吸困难的可见性具有重要意义。