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 […]
Category: Journal Announcements
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 […]
December 2021 Special Issue: Transplantation and its Imaginaries
Transplantation: changing biotechnologies and imaginaries Donna McCormack, Margrit Shildrick Hauntological dimensions of heart transplantation: the onto-epistemologies of deceased donation Margrit Shildrick The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities Donna McCormack Faecal microbiota transplants: towards a healthy disgust scepticism Jessica Houf ‘Dirty pigs’ and the xenotransplantation paradox Gill Haddow May I have your […]
‘Creative Ferment’: Abortion and Reproductive Agency in Bessie Head’s Personal Choices Trilogy
Article Summary by Caitlin Stobie Using original archival research, this article examines representations of abortion in three novels by Bessie Head, an author who was born in South Africa and lived in Botswana for most of her life. I argue that Head documents both changing attitudes to terminations of pregnancy and dramatic environmental, medical, and […]
In “Torlak” We (Would) Trust: Domestic Vaccine Production in Contemporary Serbia
Article Summary by Marija Brujić An overly positive memory of life in socialist Yugoslavia, called Yugonostalgia, is very dominant among the public in contemporary Serbian post-socialist society. People who used to live in former Yugoslavia still talk with pride about the quality of life during that time, including the quality of its health system and […]
Decolonising ‘Man’, Resituating Pandemic: An Intervention in the Pathogenesis of Colonial Capitalism
Article Summary by Rosemary J Jolly I use the Humanities to expose how we conceive of the human as a construction that can be changed. I counter Enlightenment Man, the basic ‘unit’ of Western medicine, with the African humanism of Es’kia Mphahlele. Mpahlele describes humans as needing to live with, rather than exploiting, non-human animals […]