Wendy MacNaughton, How to Say Goodbye (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. ISBN-13: 978-1639730858). Book Review by Jess Libow In her 2023 guide to caring for the dying, How to Say Goodbye, illustrator Wendy MacNaughton implores her readers to look closely. As she explains in the introduction, drawing is one way of doing just that. The same might […]
Category: Book Reviews
Physicians and Patients Should Be Steering the Healthcare Ship
Book Review by Janina Levin Drew Remignanti, The Healing Connection: A Partnership for Your Health (Something or Other Publishing, 2023. ISBN-13: 978-1954102156). Analyses of healthcare of systems in the US (and the UK) have laid bare alarming asymmetries of power. Hypocrisy is the hidden message in medical education. Insurance companies and hospital administrators influence doctors’ […]
How Chance Occurrences Can Affect Your Health
Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham. Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients And Shape Our Health (Doubleday, 2023. ISBN-13: 978-0385548816). Book Review by Dr. Isabella Watts Random Acts of Medicine opens with the line “chance occurrences change the course of our lives all the time.” We can all think […]
The Idea of Medicine as Poetry: Alan Bleakley’s “Keats’ Lexicon”
The Bio-Illogical (Liverpool: The Artel Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1739900335). Book Review by Dr. Shane Neilson Alan Bleakley knows a thing or two about Keats. As an emeritus professor of medical education and medical humanities at Plymouth University Peninsula Medical School, one of his areas of scholarly interest has been increasing medical learners and practitioners’ tolerance […]
Candid and Caring Lessons in the Realities of Death
Book Review by Dr. Isabella Watts What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1645020509). In What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking Rupert Callender weaves information about the funeral industry with autobiographical experiences to share important lessons about the profession. […]
Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers
Book Review by Kristie Serota At ninety-nine short pages, Shiloh Krupar’s new book Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers (2023) is an epistemological heavyweight. This small book, one in a series of thought-in-process scholarship from the University of Minnesota Press, is light to hold and heavy to read. Krupar explores the geographical foundations of […]
Book Excerpt from Ike Anya’s Small by Small
Book Excerpt from Ike Anya’s Small by Small Small by Small, Ike Anya’s newly published memoir, charts his journey to become a doctor in Nigeria. A medical memoir unlike any from the West, it is filled with the colour and vibrancy of tempestuous 1990s Nigeria, where political unrest, social change and a worsening economy make […]
The Paramedic at Work: A Sociology of a New Profession
McCann, L. (2022). The Paramedic at Work: A Sociology of a New Profession. Oxford University Press. Book Review by Robin Burrow Many healthcare systems across the world are in crisis. For most, this is not a new state of affairs, though it has undoubtedly been exasperated by the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the […]
Understanding the Complexities of Dementia: A Personal and Scientific Journey
Book Review by Agustin Ibanez Cindy Weinstein, Bruce L. Miller. Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. 216 pp. ISBN 978-1421441269. In the summer of 2010, I moved to a beautiful apartment in the affluent Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was hoping […]
Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins James Davies. Atlantic Books, 2021. 9781786499875. More than 20 per cent of adults take a psychiatric drug each year in Britain alone–over a 500 per cent increase since 1980. Despite this ‘prescription epidemic’, the prevalence of mental illnesses, from the least to most severe, has simultaneously risen. Many of […]