Book Review by Dr Isabella Watts Published by One World and Virago This book is the beautiful memoir the artist Riva Lehrer, detailing her experiences of life, love, and her engagement with disability culture. Born in 1958 Lehrer is diagnosed with spina bifida- a condition of the spinal cord which many infants at that time […]
Category: Book Reviews
We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation
Book Review by Isabella Watts Eric Garcia, We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. Mariner Books, 2021. 304 pages. The well-respected political journalist Eric Garcia has written for publications including The Washington Post, The Week, and The New Republic for many years. He is now the senior Washington Correspondent for The Independent. This is his […]
Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity
Book Review by Swati Joshi Spencer, Danielle. Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pages: 369. ISBN 978-0-19-751076-6. Danielle Spencer’s Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity (2021) is the strong jet stream that shudders the “biopathological” (8) gaze compelling us to “locate the pathology—in ourselves” (xi). Her research […]
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
Book Review By Matthew Harris Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the anatomy of injustice. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. ISBN: 9780374602512, 496 Pages. The central plea in Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s Inflamed is to have the reader acknowledge that colonial capitalism, which separates society from nature, subverts the holism required […]
Encountering Pain: Hearing, Seeing, Speaking
Book Review by Jennifer Bracken Scott Edited by Deborah Padfield and Joanna M. Zakrzewska ISBN: 9781787352636 UCL Press, 2021 Full text of book is available online at https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10120621/1/Encountering-Pain.pdf Pain is an important indicator that something is wrong in the body. But pain is also invisible and immeasurable to anyone besides the patient; while an […]
Diagnosis: Truth and Tales
Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Jutel, Annemarie Goldstein. Diagnosis: Truth and Tales. University of Toronto Press, 2019. In a short verse from his posthumous collection Falling Ill (2016), American poet C. K. Williams offered a richly ambiguous representation of his experience receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. The poem, “Diagnosis,” begins with a coherent reflection on […]
Civilian Lunatic Asylums During the First World War: A Study of Austerity on London’s Fringe
Book Review by Peter Tyrer Claire Hilton. Palgrave MacMillan, 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-54870-4 The moral status of a country can be determined by its treatment of the mentally ill. On this count Norway and Sweden do well, Russia and the US do badly, and the United Kingdom is in between. But was it always thus? This […]
Book Review: Claire Hilton on “Staring Night” by Robert Abrams.
Staring Night: Queen Victoria’s Late-life Depression by Robert C Abrams (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-949093-55-1) by Claire Hilton MD PhD FRCPsych, Historian in Residence, Royal College of Psychiatrists, 21 Prescot St, London E1 8BB, UK historian@rcpsych.ac.uk In the last few months of her life, Queen Victoria was solemn, sad, and fearful, yet […]
Book Review: “Body Talk in the Medical Humanities: Whose Language”
by Teodora Manea Jennifer Patterson and Francia Kinchington (eds): Body Talk in the Medical Humanities: Whose Language, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, pp. 311 This book explores different discourses around the body, focusing on the idea of body-talk and body language. The complexity of this topic is generated by the fact that we […]
Book Review: Helen King, “Hippocrates now: the ‘father of medicine’ in the internet age”
by Owen Rees Helen King. Hippocrates now: the “father of medicine” in the internet age. Bloomsbury studies in classical reception. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 262 p. ISBN 9781350005891 Medicine and the internet have always had an uneasy relationship, with ‘Dr Google’ regularly prophesising doom to any unsuspecting enquirer typing in their symptoms. For […]