Instrumental by James Rhodes Canongate Books, 2015. £16.99 hardcover, £14.99 E-Book Reviewed by Vivek Santayana, Postgraduate student in Literature and Modernity, The University of Edinburgh James Rhodes’s controversial memoir, Instrumental, is about many things. On the one hand, it is about the trauma of child rape. There is an ethical dimension to the […]
Category: Book Reviews
The Reading Room: Call for Reviewer
Julie Laplante’s Healing Roots: Anthropology in Life and Medicine is available for review. “Umhlonyane, also known as Artemisia afra, is one of the oldest and best-documented indigenous medicines in South Africa. This bush, which grows wild throughout the sub-Saharan region, smells and tastes like “medicine,” thus easily making its way into people’s lives and […]
The Reading Room: ePatients Conference, Queen’s University Belfast
ePatients The Medical, Ethical and Legal Repercussions of Blogging and Micro-Blogging Experiences of Illness and Disease Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities Queen’s University Belfast, 11-12 September 2015 The provisional programme for this conference is now available: Friday 11th September 11.00 – 11.30 Registration 11.30 – 11.45 […]
The Reading Room: ‘Patients as People’
Emma Barnard MA (RCA) ___________________________________________________________________ PATIENTS AS PEOPLE – an Exhibition by Emma Barnard in collaboration with consultant surgeons and patients within the ENT department, Whipps Cross University Hospital, Barts Health NHS. As a fine artist working predominantly within the field of photography, video and sound, I have for the past few years […]
The Reading Room: A review of ‘The Cambridge Companion to The Body in Literature’
The Cambridge Companion to The Body in Literature Edited by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude CUP 2015 Reviewed by Alan Radley Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, Loughborough University, UK a.r.radley@lboro.ac.uk It was in the course of having a routine eye examination that I talked to the ophthalmologist about reviewing the present book, […]
The Reading Room: A review of Oliver Sacks’ ‘On the Move: A Life’
On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks. London: Picador, 2015 Reviewed by Paul Gordon, Psychotherapist Earlier this year, not long before this book was published, neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of hugely popular works such as Awakenings, Hallucinations and The Man Who Mistake His Wife for a Hat, announced that he had been diagnosed […]
The Reading Room: A review of ‘The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy’
The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy by Arabella Kurtz and J.M. Coetzee London: Harvill and Secker, 2015. Reviewed by Vivek Santayana, The University of Edinburgh Abstract: Arabella Kurtz and J.M. Coetzee’s The Good Story is a dialogue between a consulting clinical psychologist with an interest in literary studies and a […]
The Reading Room: Seamus O’Mahony on Richard Asher
Brimful of Asher Seamus O’Mahony, Consultant Physician, Cork University Hospital Richard Asher: Talking Sense. London: Pitman Medical, 1972. A Sense of Asher. London: British Medical Association, 1984. The Royal Society of Medicine recently (3 November 2014 – 24 January 2015) held an exhibition called “Richard Asher (1912-1969): A Celebration”. Asher, an English physician […]
The Reading Room: A review of ‘Pain and Emotion in Modern History’
Pain and Emotion in Modern History. Boddice R (ed). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 Reviewed by Dr Deborah Padfield Visual Artist and Research Associate, UCL CHIRP Interdisciplinary Research Fellow, Slade School of Fine Art Pain and Emotion in Modern History claims to be ‘a rich exploration of the affective expression of pain, the emotional experience of […]
The Reading Room: The 2015 Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Prize
The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine is an annual international prize for an unpublished poem on a medical subject. It was launched in 2009 and consists of awards in three categories: An Open Category An NHS Category A Category for Young Poets (14-18 years). The 2015 judges were poets Rebecca Goss and Simon […]