Article Summary by Jill Felicity Durey Before social media, novelists could help or hinder medical progress for humans and animals, as often their works were serialised. This article discusses the strong influence of Wilkie Collins, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy on public acceptance or rejection of the medical use of vivisection. Collins, in the nineteenth […]
Category: Journal Announcements
Lessons from the Frontlines: A Junior Doctor’s Experience of the First Wave of the COVID-19 Epidemic in a Resource-Limited Setting
Article Summary by Brabaharan Subhani and Dilushi Wijayaratne Sri Lanka is a low middle-income country which has a dominant state-run health service that provides free healthcare. The high rates of literacy and welfare orientation have enabled the country to achieve favourable health outcomes at a relatively low cost. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has stretched our […]
Making Emergency Responders Visible: Working-class Responses to Industrial Disaster in Nineteenth-Century Journalism and Poetry
Article Summary by Rosalyn Buckland Hidden beneath the ground in coalmines, or behind the walls of factories, the injured bodies of workers have too often been overlooked. While the nineteenth-century saw workplaces become ever more dangerous, journalists struggled to tell these stories. Using poems by Joseph Skipsey, I challenge journalistic neglect in order to illuminate the actions […]
War of Conscience: Anti-Vaccination and the Battle for Medical Freedom During World War One
Article Summary by Susan McPherson Many high-income countries have relatively high COVID vaccination uptake among people vulnerable to disease. There is also significant ‘vaccine hesitancy’ in some groups. Doubts may be fuelled to some extent by anti-vaccination campaigns. The term ‘anti-vax’ tends to be used to criticise those engaged in or endorsing anti-vaccination as though […]
Person-ness of Voices in Lived Experience Accounts of Psychosis: Combining Literary Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
Article Summary by Elena Semino, Demjen Zsofia and Luke Collins A substantial minority of the general population and a considerable majority of people with diagnoses such as schizophrenia hear voices that other people cannot hear—a phenomenon that is sometimes described as a type of hallucination. Psychologists have noticed that reports of voice hearing differ in […]
Be Still, My Beating Heart: Reading Pulselessness from Shakespeare to the Artificial Heart
Article Summary by Claire Hansen and Michael Charles Stevens This article explores how Shakespearean drama can help us to understand the significance of the heartbeat—medically and culturally. Patients with modern artificial hearts (or “LVADs”) do not have a discernible pulse. This undermines centuries of understanding the pulse as central to human life. To consider this […]
New-Media Arts-Based Public Engagement Projects Could Reshape the Future of Generative Biology
Article Summary by Diaa Ahmed Mohamed Ahmedien Interactive new-media artworks have been always known as a powerful means of science outreach not only because they visually communicate the research outputs to the laypeople but also due to their operational structures that enable non-scientists to be integrated into the processes of science-making. I have discussed several […]
Traditional Proverbs Help Us Understand Hunger and Malnutrition in Malawi
Article Summary by Anne Dressel, Elizabeth Mkandawire, Lucy Mkandawire-Valhmu Hunger and malnutrition are ongoing challenges in Malawi, especially in rural areas. Over 80% of the population is rural, and many practice subsistence farming—growing their own food to feed themselves and their families. The World Food Program estimates that 37% of Malawian children under the age […]
Politics of Difference and Grammars of Influence in the Postgenomic Era: Fire, Soil, Spirit
Article Summary by Lara Choksey The great and humbling lesson of the Human Genome Project was that histories of embodiment are complex social matters. The era in the life sciences imperfectly described as the postgenomic, the period ‘after’ the sequencing of the human genome, has involved a turn to the effects of influences external to […]
Time Considered as a Helix of Infinite Possibilities
Article Summary by Jay Clayton This contribution to the special issue of Medical Humanities on Global Genetic Fictions focuses on an award-winning science fiction story by Samuel R. Delany, “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” In the story, Delany imagines something he calls “hologramic information storage,” which allows an interplanetary Special Service agent […]