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 […]
Category: Book Reviews
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The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine is an annual international prize for an unpublished poem on a medical subject.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 […]
The Reading Room: The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group
The Birkbeck Medical Humanities reading group aims to create a space in which academics, clinicians and students can come together to explore key readings, ideas and materials in the field of medical humanities. Our endeavour is to find ways of talking across the different disciplines of the humanities and medicine, and we welcome participation […]
The Reading Room: Upcoming workshop on ageing
Medical Humanities and Ageing, 29/06/2015 An initiative of the CHCI Medical Humanities Network Program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) Location: Old Committee Room, King’s Building, King’s College London, Strand Campus, Strand, London WC2R 2LSDate: Monday 29th June 2015 The Centre for the Humanities and Health, […]
The Reading Room: A review of ‘Health Humanities’
Health Humanities Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, Charley Baker, Victoria Tischler and Brian Abrams (London: Palgrave, 2015) Reviewed by Dr Maria Vaccarella, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Medical Humanities, Centre for the Humanities and Health, King’s College London In her foundational study Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (1999), Janet Lyon explains that “the manifesto both generates and […]
Book Review: The Development of Narrative Practices in Medicine c.1960-2000
The Development of Narrative Practices in Medicine c.1960-2000 Jones E M, Tansey E M. (eds) (2015) Wellcome Witnesses to Contemporary Medicine, vol. 52. London: Queen Mary University of London. Reviewed by Ben Chisnall, Medical Student, King’s College London, UK “Narrative medicine” is a term used to refer to a number of analytical and interpretative […]
The Reading Room: The Wellcome Book Prize
The shortlist for the Wellcome Book Prize was announced today (http://wellcomebookprize.org/) Awarded annually, and open to works of fiction and nonfiction, the prize focuses on books that have some aspect of medicine, illness or health as their central theme. This year’s shortlist includes the following six titles: The Iceberg by Marion Coutts Do No […]