Article Summary by Elenore Baum Pain relief in Sub-Saharan Africa is a major public health concern, particularly for marginalized populations such as pastoralists. Their seasonal mobility and remote lifestyle with limited access to health services contribute to their vulnerability towards poorer health outcomes, including pain. To improve pastoralists’ access to pain treatment in biomedical health […]
Category: Special Issues
Transparent Boundaries as Scenographies of Trust: The COVID-19 Pandemic from the View of Material Cultural Studies and Artistic Works
Article Summary by Monika Ankele and Céline Kaiser From the start, the profound transformations that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic found expression in a plethora of objects and facilities that dominated our daily lives far beyond the clinical sphere. Supermarkets, hotel receptions, taxis, restaurants, doctors’ surgeries and even schools were equipped with plexiglass screens of all […]
What Makes a ‘Good Doctor’? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Perspectives from Medical Students with Lived Experience as Patients
Article Summary by Erene Stergiopoulos and Maria Athina (Tina) Martimianakis What counts a ‘good doctor’ depends on who we ask. Research has shown that patients prioritise communication and empathy, while doctors emphasise medical expertise, and medical students describe a combination of the two. This study explored the concepts of the ‘good doctor’ held by medical […]
Forensic Rhetoric: COVID-19 and the Boundaries of Healthcare Evidence
Article Summary by David Houston Jones The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the role of medical evidence in public health presentations. This article investigates the rhetoric of those presentations, from ‘podium’ presentations such as press conferences to online forums and visualisations of the virus. In all of these, rhetorical forms arise from the […]
Listening, learning, caring: exploring assemblages of, ethics of and pathways to care for avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID)
Article Summary by Andrea LaMarre, Kathryn McGuigan and Melinda Lewthwaite What does care mean, in the context of treatment for avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID)? In this paper, we explored that question, engaging with stories shared with us by 14 caregivers of individuals with ARFID. We were specifically interested in how participants described their […]
UK Media Responses to HIV through the Lens of COVID-19: A Study of Multidirectional Memory
Article Summary by Fran Pheasant-Kelly Covid-19 affected, and continues to affect us all to some degree. For those who were around in the 1980s, there are aspects of the virus that chillingly recall the initial terrors of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Such connections are evident in news media coverage of Covid-19 – this article examines those […]
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 […]
‘The Time is Out of Joint’: Temporality, COVID-19 and Graphic Medicine
Article Summary by Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Ishani Anwesha Joshi The article theorizes the human experiences of time during the lockdown and COVID-19 pandemic through selected comics. This research discusses how comics can be used to communicate the passage of time and argues that the events of the pandemic have shifted our temporal experience from clock […]