Article Summary by Grace Halden Is biology and knowing biological ancestral information essential to the construction of identity? Bioethicist James David Velleman believes this is the case and argues that donor gamete conception is immoral because a portion of genetic heritage will be unknown. Velleman is critical of sperm donation and the absence of a […]
Category: Journal Announcements
September 2022 Issue
Casualties of the World War II metaphor: women’s reproductive health fighting for narrative inclusion in COVID-19 Yuki Bailey, Megha Shankar, Patrick Phillips It’s about time: on the need of a temporal language for ecologically dimensioned medical humanities and public health scholarship Julia Zielke Psychedelic injustice: should bioethics tune in to the voices of psychedelic-using communities? […]
Wars and Sweets: Microbes, Medicines and other Moderns in and Beyond the(ir) Antibiotic Era
Article Summary by Coll de Lima Hutchison My article brings together diverse literatures in a playful manner to plot rises in antimicrobial resistance, COVID-19 and our warlike responses (e.g. increased surveillance of microbes, more rational disciplined subjects and increasing our antibiotic armentarium) to them, alongside other acts of ‘real’ war. It speculates that modern war […]
Capable of Being in Uncertainties: Applied Medical Humanities in Undergraduate Medical Education
Article Summary by Neepa Thacker, Jennifer Wallis and Jo Winning What are the skills required by the 21st-century doctor to deliver the best person-centred care? Medical humanities have a vital role to play in undergraduate medical education where medicine is seen as an ‘art’ as well as a ‘science’ (Wald, McFarland, and Markovina 2018). We […]
Science Fiction Authors’ Perspectives on Human Genetic Engineering
Article Summary by Derek So, Kelsey Crocker, Robert Sladek and Yann Joly One of the most notable scientific developments of the past decade was the CRISPR “gene editing” system, which made it much easier to change DNA sequences and even enabled scientists to create genetically modified children in China. Scientists, bioethicists, journalists and the public […]
Picturing Sanity, in Black and White
Article Summary by Bryan Mukandi This article tries to simulate a strange journey through a maze built around writers and artists, all grappling with the question of what it means to be ‘normal’, to ‘belong’. There are lots of ways to approach these questions. I focus on the experiences of people who struggle to maintain […]
Science Fiction in Bioethics: A Role for Feminist Narratology
Article Summary by Dr Evie Kendal This work considers why research focused on ethical issues in science and medicine frequently draw on images and ideas from science fiction, particularly when discussing emerging technologies in reproductive medicine. It argues that science fiction stories can provide a useful starting point when thinking about technologies that don’t yet […]
Imagining the Postantibiotic Future: The Visual Culture of a Global Health Threat
Article Summary by Rachel Irwin We are surrounded by health data, which became even more evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. Each day, newspapers published graphs and heat maps showing new cases. It is was not only epidemiologists, virologists and policy-makers who were interested in data, but also the general public and social media users who […]
Hearing Spiritually Significant Voices: A Phenomenological Survey and Taxonomy
Article Summary by Christopher C.H. Cook When people hear a voice in the absence of any objectively present speaker, these voices are professionally understood as auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), but those who hear such voices do not see them in this way. We surveyed a predominantly Christian group of 58 people who reported hearing spiritually […]
The Heart in Medicine, History and Culture
The heart in medicine, history and culture [read the article summary] Therese Feiler, Joshua Hordern Sacred hearts and pumps: cardiology and the conflicted body politic (1500–1900) Therese Feiler The haunted heart and the Holy Ghost: on retrieval, donation and death [read the article summary] Joshua Hordern Heart surgery and transplantation: innovations impacting on concepts of […]