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 […]
Category: Special Issues
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 […]
Time Considered as a Helix of Infinite Possibilities
Article Summary by Jay Clayton This contribution to the special issue of Medical Humanities on Global Genetic Fictions focuses on an award-winning science fiction story by Samuel R. Delany, “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” In the story, Delany imagines something he calls “hologramic information storage,” which allows an interplanetary Special Service agent […]
Painful Metaphors: Enactivism and Art in Qualitative Research
Article Summary by Peter Stilwell There is now widespread consensus that pain is subjective, meaning that it is a private and personal experience. Because pain is experienced from a person’s unique perspective, others (e.g., healthcare practitioners, family, friends) cannot directly “see” or fully understand what the experience is like. To somewhat express what it is […]
Genetic Enhancement, TED Talks and the Sense of Wonder
Article Summary by Loredana Filip Science can be communicated to the public in various ways, including books and journal articles. And yet in our digital world, online interactions have a growing impact on the audience. TED talks became a widely available and highly popular resource for the communication and reception of science. They reach huge […]