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 […]
Category: Journal Announcements
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 […]
The Transition from Abortion to Miscarriage to Describe Early Pregnancy Loss in British Medical Journals: A Prescribed or Natural Lexical Change?
Article Summary by Beth Malory “The transition from abortion to miscarriage to describe early pregnancy loss in British medical journals: A prescribed or natural lexical change?”, published in Medical Humanities in March 2022, investigates the origins of the shift from use of the word ‘abortion’ to ‘miscarriage’ in medical British English. Using the statistical technique Change Point Analysis, this […]
December 2022 Issue: Health Policy and Emotion
Health, policy and emotion Agnes Arnold-Forster, Michael Brown, Alison Moulds Women’s voices, emotion and empathy: engaging different publics with ‘everyday’ health histories Tracey Loughran, Kate Mahoney, Daisy Payling Pulling our lens backwards to move forward: an integrated approach to physician distress Sydney Amelia McQueen, Melanie Hammond Mobilio, Carol-anne Moulton Cicely Saunders, ‘Total Pain’ and emotional […]
Biopower Under a State of Exception: Stories of Dying and Grieving Alone During COVID-19 Emergency Measures
Article Summary by J. Cristian Rangel For Helen During the first waves of COVID-19, governments across the world enforced lockdown policies with the intention of protecting entire populations from infection and death. This was done under a climate of scientific and medical uncertainty about the infectivity and lethality of the novel coronavirus. Because these policies […]