Rana Awdish, In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope (2018), New York: Bantam Press, 272 pp, £14.99. Reviewed by Róisín King, Trinity College Dublin Aptly stated by Ed Pellegrino, ‘medicine is the most humane of the sciences, the most scientific of the humanities’. This implies an essential balance […]
Category: Arts in Medicine
Diary of a Bipolar Explorer
Lucy Newlyn, Diary of a Bipolar Explorer (2018), Oxford: Signal Books, 232pp, £9.99. Reviewed by Neil Vickers Lucy Newlyn was until recently Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on English Romantic poetry. She has published two collections of poetry: Ginnel (2005) and Earth’s Almanac (2015). […]
100 Days of Medical Humanities Helping Health
Today’s guest blog post comes from Professor Marion Lynch, Deputy Medical Director of NHS England, Visiting Professor University of West London Dementia Care and Trustee of Paintings in Hospitals. Prof Lynch is spearheading 100 days of Medical Humanities helping health, 100 days of tweets up to 5th July 2018 to celebrate the UK National Health […]
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 […]
Art Review: Visions of Multiple Sclerosis
Hannah Laycocks’s Visions of Multiple Sclerosis: Perceiving Identity Reviewed by Shahd Alshammari, PhD. When artists’ work is considered provocative, you usually think that their choice of subject is taboo. While certainly not “taboo”, the disabled body, and even more interestingly the “invisible disabled body”, in itself a paradox, is a subject that medical […]
Physicians and Magicians: A Magical Education in Life, Death, Power, Potions and Defence Against the Dark Arts by Fiona Dogan and Mark Harper
Abstract The worlds of magic and medicine both involve the sudden initiation of an intimate relationship between two complete strangers – the magician and their subject, or the doctor and their patient. Magic requires the subject to have some degree of trust in the magician, to accept that props and setting may be required to […]
The Artist in Theatre: On the Primacy of the Subjective Narrative by Jac Saorsa
Drawing Women’s Cancer explores the lived experience of gynaecological illness through a unique interrelation between art and medical science. Based in Cardiff and supported by Cardiff University and Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, the project began in 2012 as a collaboration between myself and Amanda Tristram, gynaecological surgeon. Since then it has produced two […]
Artist Mark Gilbert and his Portraits of Care: Medical Humanities’ Editors Choice
Anyone lucky enough to have come across or been engaged with Mark Gilbert’s work in the Changing Faces exhibition will be pleased to hear that more of his work is now publicly available. http://mh.bmj.com/content/suppl/2010/06/23/36.1.5.DC1/MH_Appendix_003780.pdf One of Mark’s paintings, Jarad, featured on the cover of the June issue of Medical Humanities and I would urge you to go […]
Believing Without Seeing
Esref Armagan was born blind in Ankara, Turkey. He has now become a famous artist due to his sheer talent and also due to certain significant and unusual reasons. His art displays the colour, vividness, light, dark, imagination and perspective that we are used to considering as the gifts of sight. Esref is changing the […]