Guy Dargert, The Snake in the Clinic: Psychotherapy’s Role in Medicine and Healing. London: Karnac, 2016 Reviewed by Dr Jane Slater The best review of a book is unlikely to be written by an enthusiast, so I need to confess upfront that this book blew me away. The first time I read […]
Month: February 2017
The European Doctors Orchestra and the Irish Medical Choir
Professor Des O’Neill One of the pleasures of medicine is the frequent sense of a shared vision of how enmeshed it is with the humanities. As a group, doctors tend to have a high level of cultural engagement: for example, our own studies show that over 50% of medical students play, or have played an […]
Reflections on Art, Voicelessness, and the Patient Experience
Emma Barnard MA (RCA) ‘Silence is not Golden’ ‘For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate, affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied’. Susan Sontag One […]
Film Review: It’s Only the End of the World
It’s only the end of the world, directed by Xavier Dolan, Canada, France 2016. In UK cinemas from 24th February 2017 Reviewed by Dr Franco Ferrarini Louis (Gaspard Ulliel) is a 34-year-old gay playwright who feels an urgent need to meet his family after 12 years of estrangement, to tell them about his terminal illness […]
Book Review: True Tales of Organisational Life
True Tales of Organisational Life Barbara-Anne Wren Karnac Books Ltd, 2016 ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-189-2 Reviewed by Dr Andrew Schuman It’s stories, the psychologist Barbara-Anne Wren reminds us, “that will hold us when nothing else can”. They are humankind’s most effective way of making sense of the world – of organising and giving “a […]
Book Review: This Way Madness Lies.
This Way Madness Lies. Madness and Beyond. By Mike Jay. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016. Reviewed by Dr Allan Beveridge Published to accompany the recent Wellcome Collection Exhibition, ‘Bedlam: the asylum and beyond’, this book is packed with over 600 photographs and illustrations drawn from the archives of institutions in Europe and America, […]