Article summary by Chelsea Wenzhu Xu This article explores the “big heroine” drama genre, a new type of television show in China that tells powerful and dramatic stories of urban women. By examining this genre through multiple lenses—cultural studies, Marxist theory, feminist film and media studies, and medical humanities—the article analyzes how these shows critique […]
Category: Journal Announcements
You and Your Baby (Home, Husband, and Doctor)
Article Summary by Kate Errington You and Your Baby was a pregnancy advice booklet, produced by the British Medical Association (BMA) from 1957–1987. This booklet was provided to expectant mothers in the UK, free of charge, and offered authoritative information on pregnancy, childbirth and caring for infants. But, in addition to the typical information you […]
Deconstructing Taboos of Surrogacy and Backstreet Abortion in the Arab World
Review of ‘A Tie of a Womb’ (Selat Rahem)’ TV series, directed by Tamer Nady, Egypt, 2024, available on Shahid MBC in Arabic with English subtitles Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent. Surrogate pregnancy, backstreet abortion, doctor/patient romantic relationships, and doctors’ addiction are sensitive issues everywhere, but particularly so in the Arab world. […]
Conceptual Anatomy of the Female Genitalia Using Text Mining and Implications for Patient Care
Article Summary by Carmen Thong and Alexis Doyle Using the word ‘vagina’ to describe the vulva would be the same as using the word ‘throat’ to describe the mouth; yet, the word ‘vagina’ is commonly used to name the vulva or the whole genitalia whilst the word ‘vulva’ is hardly ever used. Our article analyzes […]
Too Good for this World: Moral Bioenhancement and the Ethics of Making Moral Misfits
Article Summary by Katherine Ward Moral bioenhancement is the use of biomedical technologies to alter the moral characteristics of people; it’s the attempt to make people more moral through medical intervention. Some philosophers argue that we have a duty to morally enhance ourselves. We recently struggled to cooperate during a pandemic—to shift our behavior to […]
Ethical Guidelines for Antiracism Work in Medicine: Lessons from the Antiracist Healing Collaborative
Article Summary by Rupinder Legha Racism is a centuries-old public health crisis that has devastated countless lives. Up until recently, it did not garner much attention in healthcare. The worldwide racial reckoning that transpired in 2020 in the midst of the COVID pandemic and George Floyd’s lynching changed that. An explosion of antiracism efforts has […]
The ‘Glasgow Effect’: The Controversial Cultural Life of a Public Health Term
Article Summary by Fred Spence Why are so many more Glaswegians dying, and younger, compared to English cities with almost identical deprivation levels? This was a hot topic in Scottish public health debates in the early twenty-first century. Public health researchers, particularly the Glasgow Centre of Population Health (GCPH), used the terms ‘Glasgow effect’ and […]
Meaning and Role of Functional-Organic Distinction: A Study of Clinicians in Psychiatry and Neurology Services
Article Summary by Alice Chesterfield and Jordan Harvey Despite much controversy, the functional-organic distinction attempts to distinguish symptoms, signs, and syndromes that can be explained by diagnosable biological changes (‘organic’) from those that cannot (‘functional’). It appears across medicine but has particular relevance in neuropsychiatric settings where it is often central to treatment decisions and […]
Narratives of Childhood Sexual Abuse: Healing Through Music in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach
Article Summary by Neha Hejaz and Rajni Singh This article is an attempt to acknowledge the clinical uses of fictional narratives of Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA) within health care. The purpose of studying fiction lies in exploring the lives of individuals in an imaginative manner, offering a deeper existential understanding of problems, and developing of […]
Personalism and Boosting Organ ResERVOirs: A Consideration of Euthanasia by Removal of Vital Organs in the Canadian Context
Article Summary by Jamie Grunwald Canada’s decriminalisation of assisted death has elicited significant ethical implications for the use of assisted death in healthcare contexts. Euthanasia by removal of vital organs (ERVO) is a theoretical extension of medically assisted death with an increased plausibility of implementation in light of the rapid expansion of assisted death eligibility […]