Article Summary by Burcu Alkan “‘Freudism’ and Modernity: Transcultural Impact of Psychoanalysis in the Modern Turkish Novel” looks at ‘Freudism’ as an intellectual contact zone in the discussions of Turkish modernisation as represented in two novels: Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (1949, The Armchair of Mademoiselle Noralia) and Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (1962, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014). […]
Latest articles
Reversing the Medical Humanities
Article Summary by Helene Scott-Fordsmand In the article “Reversing the Medical Humanities” I make the argument that humanities scholars engaging in medical humanities have tended to think about how they might help improve medicine in different ways – for example by training doctors in empathy and communication, or by acting as a critic that keeps […]
Narrative and Its Discontents
Article Summary by Alastair Morrison For several decades, narrative medicine has been the most internationally recognized program for humanities education in medicine. This review article considers new work from within narrative medicine, as well as recent responses to it from other positions within medical humanities, to suggest changes of thinking underway in these fields. Specifically, […]
Metaphors and Decision Making in Parental Blogs About Their Children with Life-Limiting Diseases: Who’s Afraid of the War Metaphor?
Article Summary by Veronica Neefjes When we use war metaphors we think of a particular situation as a fight. War metaphors are widely used to spur people into action; ‘fight climate change’ and ‘war on drugs’ are just two examples. In healthcare war metaphors have a poor reputation because many fear that thinking of especially […]
Performing HeLa: Theatrical Bodies and Living Remains
Article Summary by Emma Cox My work considers the role theatre and performance play in making sense of diverse healthcare experiences, medical histories, and biomedical technologies. My essay in this issue of Medical Humanities is concerned with how theatre, as an embodied artform, can make meaning out of the complicated, traumatic histories that have built up […]
Of Dogs and Men (and Aging)
Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York Review of The Truffle Hunters (directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, Italy, 2020), available from Amazon Prime The Truffle Hunters is a subtle, cinematically beautiful documentary, drawn from the personal stories of a group of aging Italian truffle hunters. Taken together, these stories celebrate […]
Will AI Hasten a Dystopian Healthcare Landscape?
Reflection by Dr. Thanemozhi G. Natarajan PhD and Dr. Natarajan Ganesan PhD In the movie Idiocracy (2006), a cryogenically frozen man named Joe wakes up in a distant future where the world has become a dystopian wasteland. One of the most striking scenes in the movie occurs when Joe goes to the doctor for a […]
Justice for Indigenous People
Film Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent Wednesday 9th August 2023 marks the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People celebrated by the United Nations (UN). The day commemorates the first meeting of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations held in Geneva in 1982. According to UN statistics, there is an estimated […]
Ethnology, Part II: In Close Contact with Thoughts and Things
Blog by Susanne Lundin In this second part of a two-part series on the role of ethnology as a humanistic discipline, we look closely at ethnological methods. We saw in part one how a nineteenth-century pregnant farmer’s wife in a Swedish parish placed an axe under her marital bed, hoping to influence the sex of […]
Conference Announcement: Medicine and The Arts Symposium, Barcelona, 19th-21st October 2023
Announcement by Jonathan McFarland, President of The Doctor as a Humanist Medicine and healthcare seem to be at a crossroads; some may say, reinterpreting Shakespeare that there is something rotten in the state medical education, and thus in healthcare, in general. And certainly, since the pandemic, whose vestiges are still being seen around the world, […]