Matthew Harris, Decolonizing Healthcare Innovation: Low-Cost Solutions from Low-Income Countries (Routledge, 2023, 272 pp., ISBN 9781032284958). Book Review by Dr. Tom Bashford and Dr. Brandon Smith Global health is a burgeoning field, the subject of an increasing number of research articles, academic programmes, and discussion.1 Over the past twenty years, it has rapidly evolved from […]
Category: Book Reviews
Navigating Borders: The Intersection of State Policies, Immigration, and HIV Testing in Canada
Laura Bisaillon, Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience (UBC Press, 2022, 288 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0774867481). Book review by Kevin Madill Laura Bisaillon’s Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience is a pioneering examination of how Canada’s immigration policies intersect with HIV testing. Bisaillon offers an in-depth analysis of how these […]
Healing the Lived Body
Drew Leder, The Healing Body: Creative Responses to Illness, Aging, and Affliction (Northwestern University Press, 2023, 240 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0810146389). Book Review by Matthew Swanson Too often, medical care is offered and experienced as a form of expert technical intervention. Doctors perceive the patient in the role of a passive recipient, and we comply. Dr. […]
Artificial Wombs are Coming. Are We Ready for Their Effects?
Laura Johnson Dahlke, Outer Origin: A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of Human Experience (Pickwick Publications, 2024. ISBN-13: 978-1666772104). Book Review by Erika Warbinton Laura Johnson Dahlke’s Outer Origin: A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of Human Experience is an essential read for anyone interested in artificial womb technology and its implications for […]
An Interdisciplinary Alliance that Matters: Medical Humanities
Anna M. Elsner and Monika Pietrzak-Franger, eds., Literature and Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2024. ISBN-13 978-1009300070). Book Review by Burcu Alkan Medical humanities has gained extensive attention in the past decade and is now an institutionally established interdisciplinary field. Yet, historically speaking, literature and medicine were not quite so separate in the first place. As […]
Illustrating End of Life Care
Wendy MacNaughton, How to Say Goodbye (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. ISBN-13: 978-1639730858). Book Review by Jess Libow In her 2023 guide to caring for the dying, How to Say Goodbye, illustrator Wendy MacNaughton implores her readers to look closely. As she explains in the introduction, drawing is one way of doing just that. The same might […]
Physicians and Patients Should Be Steering the Healthcare Ship
Book Review by Janina Levin Drew Remignanti, The Healing Connection: A Partnership for Your Health (Something or Other Publishing, 2023. ISBN-13: 978-1954102156). Analyses of healthcare of systems in the US (and the UK) have laid bare alarming asymmetries of power. Hypocrisy is the hidden message in medical education. Insurance companies and hospital administrators influence doctors’ […]
How Chance Occurrences Can Affect Your Health
Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham. Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients And Shape Our Health (Doubleday, 2023. ISBN-13: 978-0385548816). Book Review by Dr. Isabella Watts Random Acts of Medicine opens with the line “chance occurrences change the course of our lives all the time.” We can all think […]
The Idea of Medicine as Poetry: Alan Bleakley’s “Keats’ Lexicon”
The Bio-Illogical (Liverpool: The Artel Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1739900335). Book Review by Dr. Shane Neilson Alan Bleakley knows a thing or two about Keats. As an emeritus professor of medical education and medical humanities at Plymouth University Peninsula Medical School, one of his areas of scholarly interest has been increasing medical learners and practitioners’ tolerance […]
Candid and Caring Lessons in the Realities of Death
Book Review by Dr. Isabella Watts What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1645020509). In What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking Rupert Callender weaves information about the funeral industry with autobiographical experiences to share important lessons about the profession. […]