Atomised. Jim Bond. Animated Sculpture, 2005

Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is a wonderful research and teaching resource. It’s also has an exhibition space that’s open to the public. more…

This Christmas I received a very special present from my husband. After 23 years I guess he knows a thing or two about how to get me excited and he knows just the man to do it.  He also knew, as we must all surely know by now, that this was an austerity Christmas. A time to reuse, recyle and act with restraint. And so, armed with a limited budget and a detailed knowledge of his artsy doc wife’s weaknesses, he found himself in one of London’s second hand bookstores. more…

So where do you go, bedsides straight to our very own journal, website and blog, if you’re a clinician, educator or academic in the UK and Ireland with an interest, or even just a fledgling curiosity, about medical humanities?

To the Association of Medical Humanities of course. Following this link to the Association’s website to find out more. And why not join up? The more the merrier!

http://www.amh.ac.uk

We live in a society obsessed with the body: the body perfect; the body far from perfect; the body as commodity- modified, objectified, sold on to the highest bidder; the body as art and as the inspiration for art; the body as a source of identity; and the disrupted or diseased body as the object of societal taboo and medical attention. Yet few of us pause in our daily work to try to understand the central role our bodies, and our patients’ bodies, play in the lives we lead. Until of course something goes wrong.

more…

I’ve been ill. For two whole days. Horribly, gut wrenchingly, toilet bowl huggingly, head piercingly ill. For two whole days. So now I know what my patient felt like, right? The one who ‘gave’ this to me a few days ago when I visited her at home. The one who, in her 90th year, whilst clearly overwhelmed by the practical challenges raised by the physical symptoms I am now so intimately acquainted with, didn’t want to fuss, to be a bother, to waste anyone’s time. more…

Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (published by Canongate) is an exploration of the emotional and practical turmoil engendered by caring for someone who is grasping at straws to evade the terminal truth of their illness.

The narrative probes a friendship between two feisty women when it is taken to new levels of intensity by a clash in ideology. Helen (who deliberately shares the author’s name) starts off with noble intentions. She prepares her spare room with due consideration for longstanding-friend Nicola’s feng shui inclinations, hoping to strike just the right balance between practicality and homeliness. Nicola, riven with cancer, is coming to Sydney to spend a small fortune on alternative therapy at the Theodore Institute. Predictably, the Institute proves fantastically adept at sales talk but medically deeply dubious. Nicola emerges from intravenous Vitamin C treatment and ozone cupping weakened and wracked with excruciating pain, but she holds out against morphine until she – and, more particularly, Helen – can bear it no longer. Nicola is coaxed into reengaging with orthodox medicine by her outraged and exhausted friend. more…

The other day I made a call to our local hospital to ask a colleague to see a patient of mine as a matter of urgency. I asked the switchboard operator to page the relevant on-call registrar who duly appeared on the other end of the line. Using “hello?” as his tense, inpatient, opening gambit wasn’t a good start. more…

In the last few weeks, working as a GP, it seems like I’ve seen more pneumonia and bronchitis than at any time in the last 20 years. As a practice, we’ve also had a number of our elderly patients admitted as emergencies, sometimes after seeing one of us and sometimes when they’ve sought hospital care directly. On several occasions they were found collapsed or semi-conscious at home. Some, sadly, passed away whilst others spent several weeks recuperating in and out of hospital. more…

I’d always hoped that one day I’d finally get to grips with the contents of Gray’s Anatomy. Perhaps then I’d be able to write the sort of blog my friend Babette- a sport’s physician- would like me to write. To quote Babette, she’d like me to write something “simple, like sports, or the athlete’s heart, or sudden cardiac death, something simple.” So for you, Babette, here’s hoping that a heart stopping picture of Patrick Dempsey and some thoughts on TV’s Grey’s Anatomy will hit the mark. more…

As civilians in both Gaza and Israel spend another day living and dying in fear and surrounded by hate, Ali Abbas, a young man who as a child lost 16 members of his family and both his arms in the Iraq conflict,  tells reporter Hugh Sykes his story. Ali’s story reminds us of the human beings who make up the statistics. His dignity, fortitude, and good-humoured resilience are both humbling and hopeful.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00g4g9j

Meanwhile, on Start the Week, Andrew Marr and guests explore human identity in the age of bio-science. A perfect medical humanities end to the year. Follow this link and click on ‘this week’s programme’ to listen in.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek_20081215.shtml