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 […]
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How Swedish Residents Navigate Global Medical Markets
Blog by Emma Eleonorasdotter, Rui Liu and Susanne Lundin The global consumption of medicines has been rising and shows no signs of decreasing.1 In 2021, 13 percent of Swedish women and 7 percent of Swedish men took antidepressants, and 26 percent of both men and women were prescribed anti-hypertensives.2 While over-reliance on medicines in […]
Ethnology: In Close Contact with Thoughts and Things
Blog by Susanne Lundin In the Swedish parish of Anderslöv in the late 1880s, a pregnant farmer’s wife named Hulda placed an axe under the marital bed. She hoped her future child would be a boy because the farm needed a son to take over the business. A cracked clog in the same place would […]
Doctors Learning Storytelling and Interpersonal Skills from TV
Series Review Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent Reflections on Seventh Year Itch (TV series, directed by Karim El Shennawy, Egypt, 2023) available on Shahid MBC Integrating medical education with arts and humanities has provided great opportunities for medical students to hone their communication skills and desirable qualities such as respect and empathy.1 Combining the […]
March 2023 Issue
Chronicling the Chronic: Narrating the Meaninglessness of Chronic Pain Femke van Hout, Aukje van Rooden, Jenny Slatman Finding more Constructive Ways Forward in the Debate over Vaccines with Increased Disability Cultural Competence Carolin Ahlvik-Harju (De)Troubling Transparency: Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Clinical Applications [read the article summary] Peter David Winter, Annamaria Carusi Race, Class, Caste, Disability, […]
Find Where Light in Darkness Lies (“Love’s Labour’s Lost”, William Shakespeare)
Film Review by Franco Ferrarini, gastroenterologist, and film reviewer ‘Empire of Light’, Sam Mendes, UK, 2022 Set in the early 80’s, Hilary (Olivia Colman) is a middle-aged woman working as a duty-manager at the “Empire”, a movie theatre in Margate, Kent. ‘’Find where light in darkness lies’’ is the caption from Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ […]
Patients Making Meaning: Theorizing Sources of Information and Forms of Support in Women’s Health
Blog by Bryna Siegel Finer, Cathryn Molloy, and Jamie White-Farnham Patients suffer when they do not get the information and support that they need—particularly when they are faced with a health flashpoint, which we define in our work as a new diagnosis, a flare or worsening of an existing condition, or the point at which […]
Making Space for Disability Studies within a Structurally Competent Medical Curriculum: Reflections on Long Covid
Article Summary by Joanne Hunt This article makes a case for integrating knowledge and tools from the discipline of disability studies into undergraduate medical school curricula, with a view to encouraging critically informed, structurally competent medical education and practice. Here, ‘structural competency’ refers to the recognition that both health and healthcare are influenced by social […]
Making Modern Maternity: Special Issue CFP
We invite submissions to a special journal issue that we would like to propose to Medical Humanities on the topic “Making Modern Maternity.” Our aim for the special issue will be to explore the ways in which pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal experiences have been constructed as “modern” (or not) at multiple sites and through various […]
Somewhere Out There in a Place No One Knows: Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and the Literature of Forgetting
Article Summary by John Henning This essay reads Yoko Ogawa’s 1994 novel, The Memory Police, as a subtle allegory for the progression dementia and other neurological disorders. In Ogawa’s book, inhabitants of an unnamed island suffer a series of ‘disappearances’. At the same time on random days, they forget about things like birds, hats, roses, […]