Conferences can be somewhat dry affairs. Papers delivered as long droning monologues are liable to send even the most hardened academics into a dreary stupor. The more enticing discussions can also take their toll as the days wear on, debate often returning to ancient disputes. So what better way to break up the day and […]
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Ayesha Ahmad: Review of ‘Doing Clinical Ethics’ by Dr Daniel Sokol
Since Hippocrates in early 5 B.C., Medicine has carried an ‘angel on its shoulder’; a reflexive gaze on the skill, and phenomenologies of healing between the doctor and his patient. Ethics is a code, a practice, and a guide amid the terrain of the hands that tend to the body using instruments of medicine’s enterprise. […]
Ayesha Ahmad: “Stories are all we have”- reflecting on ‘An Imperfect Offering’ by James Orbinski
In ‘An Imperfect Offering’, a memoir written by James Orbinski on his travelling tales as a doctor working and bearing witness in some of the world’s most death-ridden and hostile regions, he writes of a man he met in Afghanistan who once said to him: “No scars, no story, no life. Sometimes, the best story […]
Ayesha Ahmad: ‘Looking and Healing Seminar’: King’s College London
Highly recommended is a forthcoming seminar to be held at the Centre for Humanities and Health, King’s College London by Dr Matha Fleming. Dr Fleming is a museum professional and academic working in the interdisciplinary nexus between the sciences, the humanities and the fine arts: her work over several decades has forged innovative and productive […]
Khalid Ali: Film Review: Asmaa: Directed by Amr Salama: Star rating ****
With annual World AIDS Day taking place 1 December, this new Egyptian film, which was shown at the recent London Film Festival, is very topical. The subject of HIV in European and American cinema has of course been explored in many films (such as “Savage nights” (1992), “Philadelphia” (1993), “The Hours” (2002), and “Angels in […]
Lucy McLellan: Conference Report-Medicine Unboxed: Values in Medicine
Medicine Unboxed is an annual one-day conference which brings together an inspirational blend of expertise in health care, philosophy, ethics, law, sociology, politics, art, film, and literature. The aim of the this year’s conference, held in October, was to explore medicine’s values through the lens of the arts and humanities; considering medical practice and policy […]
James Poskett: Stories of psychology
Who are the big names in the history of child psychology? Anna Freud? Melanie Klein? John Bowlby? Certainly. But, according to Professor Sally Shuttleworth, in order to locate the origins of child psychology, we have to look to nineteenth-century literature, to authors such as George Eliot and Charles Dickens. This is just one of the […]
Ian Williams: Graphic Medicine: Visualising the Stigma of Illness: Ian Williams
The contribution of the medium of comics (referred to in the plural to denote both the physical printed object and the attendant philosophy) to medical discourse has begun, over the past few of years, to be explored by academics interested in illness narrative, patient experience and healthcare education. Autobiographical comics and graphic novels authored by […]
A Poem ‘On the Dying of Amy Winehouse’ by Dan Moran
Among us, there are those who will not make it. Those who will contend with mortality, Wrapping themselves around it, Unable to let go. We watch them as prey through a sight. Cheer them as the mob below, Looking up at the man on the ledge. We are unsure what to hope for. We stand […]
James Poskett: Abandoning disease
Imagine you are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Your weight loss, lethargy and occasionally-blurred vision are all finally explained and your treatment, regular injections of insulin, prescribed. A month later you go back to your doctor. They open their clinical handbook, flick through the index and, rather unfortunately, ‘diabetes’ has been omitted from the latest […]