Article Summary by Agnieszka Kościańska This article focuses on Wiesław Sokoluk, one of the key Polish youth counsellors and sex educators active during the late socialist period (the 1970s and 1980s), looking at his path to becoming a sex educator and youth counsellor as well as his practice in both fields. Sokoluk started his career […]
Category: Journal Announcements
Sparing the Doctor’s Blushes: The Use of Sexually Explicit Films for the Purpose of Sexual Attitude Reassessment (SAR) in the Training of Medical Practitioners in Britain During the 1970s
Article Summary by Rob Irwin How best to prepare healthcare professionals to address their patients’ sexual health and wellbeing concerns is a question still in need of an answer. This article describes an early educational approach, the Sexual Attitude Reassessment (SAR) seminar, that was used in some British medical schools during the 1970s to prepare […]
The Production of Medicoethical Misconduct: Medical Ethics and Vivisection in Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science
Article Summary by Thomas G. Cole II Authors of popular fiction often question the world around them by telling stories that reflect their world. In so doing, these authors provide a necessary and sometimes powerful commentary on contemporary issues. This was no different for the popular fiction authors of the Victorian era. In this essay, […]
Contributions of Hippocratic Medicine and Plato to Today’s Debate Over Health, Social Determinants and the Authority of Biomedicine
Article Summary by Susan Levin Though the portion of the USA’s gross domestic product allocated to healthcare vastly surpasses that directed to other major areas of societal concern, outcomes for life expectancy and infant mortality are highly disappointing. By such measures, the USA also fares poorly in international comparisons. One’s impression that, by giving pre-eminence […]
Making Space for Disability Studies within a Structurally Competent Medical Curriculum: Reflections on Long Covid
Article Summary by Joanne Hunt This article makes a case for integrating knowledge and tools from the discipline of disability studies into undergraduate medical school curricula, with a view to encouraging critically informed, structurally competent medical education and practice. Here, ‘structural competency’ refers to the recognition that both health and healthcare are influenced by social […]
Somewhere Out There in a Place No One Knows: Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and the Literature of Forgetting
Article Summary by John Henning This essay reads Yoko Ogawa’s 1994 novel, The Memory Police, as a subtle allegory for the progression dementia and other neurological disorders. In Ogawa’s book, inhabitants of an unnamed island suffer a series of ‘disappearances’. At the same time on random days, they forget about things like birds, hats, roses, […]
(De)Troubling Transparency: Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Clinical Applications
Article Summary by Peter David Winter and Annamaria Carusi Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a powerful and prominent tool in medical research, but its acceptance in hospitals remains low due to the lack of transparency associated with these technologies. This article examines how including clinicians and clinical scientists in the collaborative practices of AI developers […]
Bubbles and Lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand: The Language of Self-Isolation in #Covid19nz Tweets
Article Summary by Jessie Burnette and Maebh Long In this paper, we explore two different ways that New Zealand Twitter users framed their experience of government COVID-19 measures during the first stage of the pandemic. When the first cases of COVID-19 were discovered in Aotearoa New Zealand during March 2020, the government quickly moved to […]
The Jew’s Penis: Circumcision and Sexual Pathology in Eighteenth-Century England
Article Summary by Noelle Gallagher This paper explores the contradictory prejudices against circumcision and Jewish male sexual behaviour that were circulating in English medical and popular discourse between 1660 and 1800. For centuries, Jewish men had been labelled as, on the one hand, lustful sexual predators, and on the other hand, harmless emasculated weaklings. I […]
Of Not Passing: Homelessness, Addiction, Mental Health and Care During Covid-19
Article Summary by Johannes Lenhard, Meg Margetts and Eana Meng People experiencing homelessness in the UK were unexpectedly and unconditionally offered housing (and support) from the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020. For many, that meant ‘(re)entering’ the support system and having a chance to ‘move on’ to longer-term housing. This beneficial effect […]