Article Summary by Marco J Haenssgen, Nutcha Charoenboon, Patthanan Thavethanutthanawin and Kanokporn Wibunjak Listen to Nutcha (Ern) Charoenboon discuss the research project below (full script below bionotes): Read the full article on the Medical Humanities journal. Global health has often been critiqued for neglecting the voices of poor, rural, and indigenous peoples around the […]
Category: Special Issues
What is Compassion?
Article Summary by Sarah Chaney Today, this trait is thought to be central to nursing. Policymakers, healthcare staff and politicians alike have debated the topic over the past decade. They have asked whether compassion can be taught or is caring an inborn trait. How might one measure or test someone’s ‘emotional intelligence’? And is compassion […]
Delirium in Hospital: Violence, Vulnerability and Humanity
Article Summary by Victoria Hume In the UK, hospitalisations from Covid have been increasing steadily since the summer. On 18 November, 923 covid patients were mechanically ventilated in hospital – this represents about a quarter of all mechanically ventilated patients.1 The Nuffield Trust tells us that covid patients typically stay longer in ICU than surgical […]
December Special Issue Podcast: Transplantation and its Imaginaries
Podcast by Brandy Schillace with Donna McCormack and Magrit Shildrick The Transplantation and its Imaginaries special issue proposes new understandings of the limits and possible extensions of organ and tissue transplantation that encompass cutting edge interdisciplinary research around biomedicine, philosophy, literature, film and transplantation studies. In our own era, the parameters of human embodiment are […]
Ka Mura Ka Muri: Understandings of Organ Donation and Transplantation in Aotearoa New Zealand
Article Summary by Rhoda Shaw and Robert Webb This article draws on research findings from a series of in-depth interviews with Māori (the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand) and Pākehā (European settler New Zealanders), concerning their views on organ donation and transplantation. Our findings show both differences and similarities between Māori and Pākehā understandings […]
The Illness-Disease Dichotomy and the Biological-Clinical Splitting of Medicine
Article Summary by Luigi Tesio and Marco Buzzoni Suffering from an “illness without a disease” is a common condition. The person is suffering, but no abnormalities can be found in the body. This is the case for chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, many chronic pain syndromes, and most psychiatric disturbances. The article replies to the debate between […]
The Rationales for and Challenges with Employing Arts-based Health Services Research (ABHSR): A Qualitative Systematic Review of Primary Studies
Article Summary by Umair Majid We conducted a systematic review of 42 studies to identify the rationales for using arts-based research in health care. We found four rationales: (1) capture aspects of a topic that may be overlooked or ignored by other methods, (2) allow participants to reflect on their own experiences, (3) generate valuable […]
A Mirror in Fiction: Drawing Parallelisms Between Camus’s La Peste and COVID-19
Article Summary by César Pérez Romero Fiction is a particular mirror of reality. It does not look to merely reflect it: it tries to enhance it in order to build art from it. Nowadays, when the entire world faces an unprecedented public health crisis (COVID-19), taking a look at fiction about epidemics constitutes a highly […]
Representing Young Men’s Experience of Anorexia Nervosa A French-Language Case Study
Article Summary by Katie Jones This article analyses two young adult (YA) novels about young men’s experience of anorexia nervosa (AN), within the dual contexts of medical humanities research into literary depictions of illness, and the broader field of young adult literature about AN. While emphasising the importance of diverse literary narratives in order to […]
Politics of Difference and Grammars of Influence in the Postgenomic Era: Fire, Soil, Spirit
Article Summary by Lara Choksey The great and humbling lesson of the Human Genome Project was that histories of embodiment are complex social matters. The era in the life sciences imperfectly described as the postgenomic, the period ‘after’ the sequencing of the human genome, has involved a turn to the effects of influences external to […]