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 […]
Category: Book Reviews
Lithium: A Doctor, A Drug, and a Breakthrough
Book review by Laura Grace Simpkins Walter A. Brown. Liveright. 2020. ISBN 9781631497902 I was prescribed lithium carbonate—two 400mg tablets to be gulped down with a large glug of water before bed—nearly four years ago. For a while I knew only several vague details about my medication: it was ‘natural’, it could easily be ‘toxic’, […]
Lumen
Book review by Laura Grace Simpkins Tiffany Atkinson. Bloodaxe Books, 2021. ISBN 978-1-78037-530-4. Morphine, ‘magnolias of paperwork’, and hammocks: these are a few of the things touched on by Tiffany Atkinson in her fourth collection of poems, Lumen. The publication is divided into two parts: a sequence followed by standalones—including many that star Otto, Atkinson’s […]
So Much More Than a Headache: Understanding Migraine through Literature
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Kathleen J. O’Shea. The Kent State University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-60635-403-2 Can language ever fully represent pain? Much writing about illness returns us to that question, including two books published this year: Pain: The Science of the Feeling Brain and Ouch!: Why Pain Hurts, and Why It Doesn’t Have […]
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 […]
Book Review: “Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History”
by Manali Karmakar Virdi, Jaipreet. Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. 319 pp. Jaipreet Virdi’s Hearing Happiness dives deep into the existential and embodied anxieties of deaf individuals by tracing the evolution of deafness cures from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-first Century. Virdi’s book, on the one […]
Review: “Moving Worlds” Special Issue on Literature, Medicine, Health
by Jeffrey M. Brown “Literature, Medicine, Health [Special Issue].” Moving Worlds 19.2 (2019) A recent volume of Moving Worlds begins with a short poem by UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage entitled “Finishing It.” “I can’t configure / a tablet / chiselled by God’s finger / or forge / a scrawled prescription,” the poet admits; instead, […]