Ferments and the AIDS Virus: Interspecies Counter-Conduct in the History of AIDS

Article Summary by Justin Abraham Linds In the early years of the American AIDS epidemic, numerous AIDS activists and people with AIDS started researching, teaching, and organizing experimental treatment options within committees such as the Alternative and Holistic Treatment Committee and the Treatment Alternatives Program. This paper briefly describes the committees before narrowing in on […]

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Exploring Gendered Leadership Stereotypes in a Shared Leadership Model in Healthcare: A Case Study

by Saam Idelji-Tehrani and Muna Al-Jawad Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, Brighton, UK Our article explores how gender played out in a group of NHS hospital consultants who adopted a shared leadership model in their department. We used comics-based research to analyse and present some of our data. Our final comic is shown […]

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December’s Special Issue on Hearing Impairment and the Medical Humanities

by Bonnie Millar People engage with sound in different ways and it can be fruitful to compare modern and historical ideas of the human experience of sound and hearing, fostering conversations between medicine, science, the arts and humanities. Medicine is more than just the analysis of bones, muscles, and samples, it also encompasses psychological and […]

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December Issue, featuring Hearing and the Medical Humanities

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our December Issue, which includes original research on a variety of medical humanities topics, and three open access articles. In addition the December issue features a Special Section on Hearing and the Medical Humanities, guest edited by Dr. Bonnie Miller, Musculoskeletal Project Manager, NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre MSK Communication Lead, […]

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‘He’s My Mate You See’: A Longitudinal Critical Discourse Analysis of the Therapeutic Role of Companion Animals for People Living with Severe Mental Illnesses

Article Summary by Helen Brooks There is increasing evidence of the supportive role pets play for people with mental health conditions. Pets have been shown to distract people from upsetting symptoms and experiences, offer an important source of comfort and routine, and promote social interaction. This paper aimed to extend our understanding of this therapeutic […]

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What’s in it for the Animals? Symbiotically Considering ‘Therapeutic’ Human-Animal Relations within Spaces and Practices of Care Farming

Article Summary by Richard Gorman Care farming is an emerging form of healthcare that aims to deploy farming practices as a type of therapeutic intervention, with human-animal relations framed as providing important opportunities for human health. The growing body of academic work on care farming links participation in a care farming scheme as having the […]

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Essential(ist) Medicine Promoting Social Explanations for Racial Variation in Biomedical Research

Article Summary by Iliya Gutin When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail—and when all you have is a definition of race rooted in biology and genetics, every racial disparity in health outcomes is attributed to these intrinsic differences. Fortunately, this narrative applies far less to contemporary biomedicine than the […]

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How “The Fault In Our Stars” Illuminates Four Themes of the Adolescent End of Life Narrative

Article Summary by Anna Obergfell Kirkman This paper suggests the creation of a new category of end of life (EOL) narrative, focused specifically on adolescents, in recognition of their distinct developmental features and their strong preferences about the dying process. Adult EOL narrative has long been showcased, and pediatric EOL narrative is often restricted by […]

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A Politics of the Senses: The Political Role of the Kings Evil in Richard Wiseman’s “Severall Chirurgicall Treatises”

Article Summary by Adam S. Komorowski Tuberculosis is a disease that comes in many forms: prior to the advent of modern medicine, one of the more common forms of tuberculosis was found in the lymph nodes in the neck. This form, especially within England and France, was known as “the King’s-Evil”. Thought to only be […]

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