Book Review by Dr. Richard M. Prior Paul Stepansky. Easing Pain on the Western Front. McFarland & Company 2020 (paperback version), 232 pages. ISBN 978-1-4766-9001-9. Paul Stepansky’s Easing Pain on the Western Front provides a very new and unique insight into the experience of U.S. Army nurses providing direct care on the battlefields of the Western […]
Category: Book Reviews
On What It Feels Like to Be A Problem
Book Review by Anna Stenning James McGrath, The Naming of Adult Autism: Culture, Science, Identity. Rowman and Littlefield International 2019 [paperback version], 272 pages. ISBN 9781783480418 In an article for the Poetry Society, Joanna Limburg explained that her collection The Autistic Alice[1] approached the issue of what it meant to write as an autistic subject […]
Medicus: The Power of Knowledge—A Novel Approach to Medical History
Exhibition Review by Prof Desmond O’Neill, MD, FRCPI The closing of an innovative exhibition of medical history in the ancient German city of Speyer may seem to be a small loss in the context of the many enormous tragic losses of life and livelihood of Covid-19. However, medical history has insights to offer on how […]
Bandage, Sort and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering
Book Review by Christopher Bosley Josh Seim. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering. University of California Press, 2020. 272 pages. ISBN: 9780520300231 This book offers a stunning analysis of the Emergency Medical System (EMS), its frontline workers, and its patients. Seim concentrates on the ambulance as an […]
Review of Long Cases in General Medicine: A 1983 Aid to the MRCP Exam
Review by Jolyon Bending Roy Pounder. Long Cases in General Medicine (second edition). Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications. 1983. I like old medical text books. They give a sense of the wishes of the author, and inform us of what was instilled in its readers. The ones that come most readily to mind are the grand […]
Mindlessness
Review by Christina Lee Thomas Joiner, Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism (New York: Oxford University Press 2017). In Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism, Thomas Joiner scrutinises the reliability of positive outcomes in publicised mindfulness-based clinical studies and brings his clinical experience in psychology to shed […]
Matthew Morgan’s Critical Finds Meaning in Intensive Care Medicine
Review by Amitha Kalaichandran, M.D. The intensive care unit (ICU) in any hospital is the most high-tech, and the least interactive, in terms of doctors and patients. I often think back to two patients in the pediatric ICU—one who had a recurrence of metastatic cancer resulting in multi-organ failure, and for which every last intervention […]
Enchanting Robots: Intimacy, Magic, and Technology by Maciej Musiał
Review by Sue Smith Enchanting Robots: Intimacy, Magic, and Technology is part of the book series, Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI, edited by Kathleen Richardson, Cathrine Hasse and Teresa Heffernan, and is written by Polish academic, Maciej Musiał. In Enchanting Robots Musiał discusses ‘magic’ and ‘magical thinking’ in order to critically assess […]
Words in Pain
Book Review by Kelechi Anucha Olga Jacoby. Ed. Jocelyn Catty, Trevor Moore, Skyscraper Publications, 2019.254pp, £15.00. Words in Pain is a collected volume of letters by a young woman named Olga Jacoby, written over a four year period from 1909 to 1913. It follows the inexorable progression of her terminal illness and is addressed to […]
The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease: New Philosophical and Scientific Developments
Book Review by Neil Vickers Derek Bolton and Grant Gillett, The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease: New Philosophical and Scientific Developments. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2019. ISBN 978-3-030-11899-0. This book is an open access book, that can be downloaded free of charge. The biopsychosocial model of health and disease (BPSM) is the nearest thing academic medicine […]