Article Summary by Gillian Lemermeyer The central notion of my research program is that the way we are with each other matters. This idea is grounded in an ethics of inclusion in a changing world and is situated in the close interface between nurses and other healthcare practitioners with the people in their care. I […]
Category: Journal Announcements
Biocolonial Pregnancies: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017)
Article Summary by Anna Kemball As part of the Special Issue on Global Health Humanities, this article considers Native American experiences of reproductive healthcare through the lens of biocolonialism. Biocolonialism is a form of colonialism that extracts value and profit from Indigenous knowledge, living organisms, and biological or genetic material. How we examine the relationship […]
‘Living in a Material World’: Frankenstein and New Materialism
Article Summary by Jasmine Yong Hall Frankenstein is generally taken as a cautionary tale of scientific arrogance. The moral is not to “play God” or to go beyond the boundaries of nature. However, what is being described is really a fear of unintended consequences which can be mitigated through better understanding and better control. Scientists […]
Nations Must be Defended: Public Health, Enmity, and Immunity in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India
Article Summary by Sandhya Shetty The article published in Medical Humanities (special issue on Global Health) is one harvest of my longstanding engagement with Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), a uniquely ill-natured attempt to turn the tide of interwar British imperial history. The article draws materials from a longer book project that seeks new ways […]
Sea of Bodies a Medical Discourse of the Refugee Crisis in Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story
Article Summary by Lava Asaad and Matthew Spencer In the memoir Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story, Pietro Bartolo (2018) relates visceral descriptions of illness, injury, and death endured by refugees on their journey of escape to the shores of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean. The medical gaze of the doctor/author further complicates the political and […]
Writing the Worlds of Genomic Medicine: Experiences of Using Participatory-Writing to Understand Life with Rare Conditions
Article Summary by Richard Gorman and Bobbie Farsides Our article, ‘Writing the Worlds of Genomic Medicine: Experiences of Using Participatory-Writing to Understand Life with Rare Conditions’ is part of our work on the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Ethical Preparedness in Genomic Medicine’ research project at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. We’ve been working with a group […]
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and the Pathologization and Medicalization of Ordinary Experiences
Article Summary by Sahanika Ratnayake In the wake of prolonged grief disorder entering the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, debates over the pathologizing and medicalizing of ordinary experiences—that is, presenting what we might think of as typical experiences such as grief as disorders requiring specialised treatment—have reignited. Psychiatry of course has a long history […]
Talking it Better: Conversations and Normative Complexity in Healthcare Improvement
Article Summary by Alan Cribb No doubt everyone would agree that conversations are valuable. Amongst other things they are one of the ways we can attend to, appreciate and learn from one another. This, of course, is relevant to practical activities like healthcare improvement. Healthcare improvement typically involves technical or formally specified processes working alongside […]
The Dying Patient: Taboo, Controversy and Missing Terms of Reference for Designers—An Architectural Perspective
Article Summary by Annie Bellamy Our societies have become more and more removed from the realities of growing old and dying. The language surrounding death, dying and who the ‘patient’ really is has become clouded and confusing, which has only been made worse by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Language and key terms of […]
Health, Well-being, and Material-Ideal Hybrid Spaces in Yeats’s Writing
Article Summary by Tudor Balinisteanu The medical humanities research carried out in our Neuroaesthetics Lab at University of Suceava asks whether art that engenders awareness of one’s embodied life is healthier than art that fosters statuary ideals. We argue that sacrificing mindfulness of one’s own embodied life in favour of spiritual or idealistic purpose can […]