Balint Matters: Psychosomatics and the Art of Assessment by Jonathan Sklar, London: Karnac, 2017, 254 pages, £27.99. Reviewed by Dr Neil Vickers. Michael Balint is mentioned in medical humanities circles as a revered ancestor, much as one might talk about William Empson as a significant figure in the history of English literary criticism. Everyone knows […]
Category: Book Reviews
Book Review: Eros and Illness
Eros and Illness by David B. Morris, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, 368 pages, £31.95. Review by George Derk, PhD (gtd2gu@virginia.edu) With the provocative pairing in the title of his new book, David Morris sets himself the task of dramatically altering the perceived relation between these two terms. As he contends, there exists less of […]
Book Review: Notes From the Sick Room
Notes from the Sick Room by Steve Finbow, London: Repeater Books, 2017, 343 pages, £8.99. Reviewed by Alan Radley, Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, Loughborough University This is a book about sickness, more specifically about the illnesses of a number of well-known artists and philosophers. It is also about the illness history of the book’s […]
Book Review: Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk
Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk by Sean McQueen, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 288 pages, £70. Reviewed by Dr Anna McFarlane (University of Glasgow) Sean McQueen’s first monograph ambitiously aims to create “a cognitive mapping of the transition from late capitalism to biocapitalism” (1) and to do this through tracing trends in science […]
Book Review – Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England
Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England by Olivia Weisser, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, 296 pages, £60. Reviewed by Sarah O’Dell, Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA 91702, sodell10@apu.edu In this well-researched and compelling work, Olivia Weisser addresses the relative paucity of scholarship on early modern gender and illness to argue […]
Book Review: The Mystery of Being Human
Raymond Tallis, The Mystery of Being Human: God, Freedom and the NHS. Notting Hill Editions, 2016. Reviewed by Dr Sara Booth This collection of essays – lucid, varied, compelling – is by retired academic geriatrician and neuroscientist Professor Raymond Tallis. A man who may truly be called a polymath, he is not […]
Book Review – A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine
Corinna Wagner and Andy Brown (Eds.) A Body of Work. An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine. London, Bloomsbury, 2016, 532 pages Jack Coulehan, MD, Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA At first glance medicine and poetry seem like strange bedfellows. Yet, consider the fact that […]
Book Review: Illness as Many Narratives
Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture by Stella Bolaki. Published by Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Reviewed by Birgit Bunzel Linder Stella Bolaki’s Illness as Many Narratives introduces several instructive case studies that squarely fit into the critical mode of the second wave of the medical humanities. Drawing on diverse arts […]
Book Review: The Snake in the Clinic
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 […]
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 […]