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 […]
Category: Book Reviews
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, […]
Book Review: Dying of Whiteness
Johnathan M. Metzl. 2019. Dying of Whiteness: How the politics of racial resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. Basic Books.352 pp. ISBN-13: 9781541644960 by Izzy Watts This book is a deep dive into how racial resentments fuel political patterns, authored by a man who is both a sociologist and psychiatrist. Through interviews and data analysis, Metzl […]
Book Review: Winston Churchill’s Illnesses
Allister Vale and John Scadding (2020). Winston Churchill’s Illnesses 1886 -1965. Frontline Books, 2020 pp 522. ISBN 978 1 52678 949 5 Book review by Adrian Crisp A 16 year old boy shuffled past the coffin in Westminster Hall and stood in the crowds outside St Paul’s Cathedral at his funeral. Fixed in my auditory […]
Performance, Medicine and the Human
Book Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Mermikides, Alex. Performance, Medicine and the Human. Methuen Drama, 2020. ISBN: 9781350022157. In 2005, US Senator Sam Brownback sponsored a bill seeking to outlaw the creation of “human chimeras,” arguing that the mere existence of “chimeras”—embryos that incorporate cellular material borrowed from either a non-human or another human source—“raises […]
Get On With You!
Review by Robert C. Abrams, M.D. Field Light, Owen Lewis At the heart of Owen Lewis’ latest collection of poems, Field Light, is the story of a middle-aged man at a multi-focal impasse—emotional, temporal, marital, professional. That man is Lewis himself, who finds himself unable to move beyond a crucial juncture in his life. The […]
Making Bodies Kosher: The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England
Book Review by Angela Davis Ben Kasstan. Making Bodies Kosher: The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England. Berghahn Books, 2019. 286 pages. ISBN: 9781789202281. In Making Bodies Kosher, Ben Kasstan, a social and medical anthropologist, explores how Haredi (strictly religiously observant) Jews navigate the complexities of engaging with biomedical maternity and infant health […]