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 […]
Category: Special Issues
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 […]
Collecting Affect: Emotion and Empathy in World War II Photographs and Drawings of Plastic Surgery
Article Summary by Christine Slobogin Diana “Dickie” Orpen (1911-1987) and Percy Hennell (1911-1987) were both surgical artists who represented Second World War patients’ wounds and their reconstructive processes within English plastic surgery wards. The major difference between these two actors is that Orpen made drawings and Hennell took photographs. This article looks at the work […]
In Critique of Anthropocentrism: A More-than-Human Ethical Framework for Antimicrobial Resistance
Article Summary by Jose A. Cañada, Salla Sariola and Andrea Butcher Antibiotics are currently the main method for controlling bacterial infections. However, their extensive use has led bacteria to develop resistance towards them. This means that the same amount of antibiotic is less and less effective in treating infections. This process is known as […]
Fatherlessness, Sperm Donors and ‘So What?’ Parentage: Arguing Against the Immorality of Donor Conception Through ‘World Literature’
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 […]