Chloé Cooper Jones. Easy Beauty: A Memoir. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2022. ISBN 9781982151997. Book Review by Samuel Freeman A baby is born “a ball of twisted muscle and tucked bone […] bent in half” with an unexpected medical condition that turns out to be sacral agenesis, a congenital absence of the […]
Month: October 2022
Music and Healing
Book Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill-Cornell Medicine, New York The Sound of Being Human by Jude Rogers, published by White Rabbit, London, UK, 2022 In recent years a fascinating neurobiological literature has emerged, describing the connections between music and one’s earliest memories and emotions.[1] Clinical applications have also been developed: Patients with advanced dementia […]
September 2022 Issue
Casualties of the World War II metaphor: women’s reproductive health fighting for narrative inclusion in COVID-19 Yuki Bailey, Megha Shankar, Patrick Phillips It’s about time: on the need of a temporal language for ecologically dimensioned medical humanities and public health scholarship Julia Zielke Psychedelic injustice: should bioethics tune in to the voices of psychedelic-using communities? […]
September 2019 Issue
Essential(ist) medicine: promoting social explanations for racial variation in biomedical research [read the article summary] Iliya Gutin Extraordinary minds, impossible choices: mental health, special skills and television Rebecca C Beirne How The Fault in Our Stars illuminates four themes of the Adolescent End of Life Narrative [read the article summary] Anna Obergfell Kirkman, Jane A […]
Bridge Work: The Behavioural and Social Sciences in Dentistry
Blog by Patricia Neville As a social scientist working in oral health research and dental education, I am regularly frustrated about how closed dentistry is to the behavioural and social sciences. Working as a sociologist in oral health research can be a lonely place. I am treated as an “exotic animal” with “curious” tools and […]
Abuse of Trust: A Psychiatrist Eroding Professional Boundaries
Film Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent ‘The Shrink Next Door’ (TV miniseries directed by Michael Showalter and Jesse Peretz, USA, 2021, available on Apple TV). Caution: this review contains plot spoilers Psychiatrist-patient stories have been a prominent theme in American cinema; ‘Analyze This’ (Harold Ramis, USA, 1999), ‘Side Effects’ (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2013), and ‘To the Bone’ (Marti […]
Wars and Sweets: Microbes, Medicines and other Moderns in and Beyond the(ir) Antibiotic Era
Article Summary by Coll de Lima Hutchison My article brings together diverse literatures in a playful manner to plot rises in antimicrobial resistance, COVID-19 and our warlike responses (e.g. increased surveillance of microbes, more rational disciplined subjects and increasing our antibiotic armentarium) to them, alongside other acts of ‘real’ war. It speculates that modern war […]
A Fantastic Voyage into the Human Body and Soul
Film Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’ (Lucien Giles Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel, France, 2022), showing on 14th and 16th of October 2022 at the London Film Festival. The human body and soul have always been an enigma for creative artists to decode in their work. Lucien Giles Castaing-Taylor and […]
Capable of Being in Uncertainties: Applied Medical Humanities in Undergraduate Medical Education
Article Summary by Neepa Thacker, Jennifer Wallis and Jo Winning What are the skills required by the 21st-century doctor to deliver the best person-centred care? Medical humanities have a vital role to play in undergraduate medical education where medicine is seen as an ‘art’ as well as a ‘science’ (Wald, McFarland, and Markovina 2018). We […]
Dehumanising Old Age, Devaluing Care, and Dismantling the NHS
Film Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent ‘Allelujah’ (Richard Eyre, UK, 2022) showing at the London Film Festival on 9th and 11th October Alan Bennett’s 2018 play ‘Allelujah’ was an insightful reflection on the big challenges currently facing the UK: an expanding population of octo and nonagenarians, limited health and social care resources, […]