Atomised. Jim Bond. Animated Sculpture, 2005 Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is a wonderful research and teaching resource. It’s also has an exhibition space that’s open to the public. […]
Latest articles
Falling in love again: an artsy doc’s guide to surviving the recession
This Christmas I received a very special present from my husband. After 23 years I guess he knows a thing or two about how to get me excited and he knows just the man to do it. He also knew, as we must all surely know by now, that this was an austerity Christmas. […]
Association of Medical Humanities
So where do you go, bedsides straight to our very own journal, website and blog, if you’re a clinician, educator or academic in the UK and Ireland with an interest, or even just a fledgling curiosity, about medical humanities? To the Association of Medical Humanities of course. Following this link to the Association’s website to […]
Taking the Body Seriously: 6th Annual AMH Conference, Durham 6-8th July 2009
We live in a society obsessed with the body: the body perfect; the body far from perfect; the body as commodity- modified, objectified, sold on to the highest bidder; the body as art and as the inspiration for art; the body as a source of identity; and the disrupted or diseased body as the object […]
Wanted: 90 year old patient to look after ailing doctor
I’ve been ill. For two whole days. Horribly, gut wrenchingly, toilet bowl huggingly, head piercingly ill. For two whole days. So now I know what my patient felt like, right? The one who ‘gave’ this to me a few days ago when I visited her at home. The one who, in her 90th year, whilst […]
Book review: The Spare Room by Helen Garner
Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (published by Canongate) is an exploration of the emotional and practical turmoil engendered by caring for someone who is grasping at straws to evade the terminal truth of their illness. The narrative probes a friendship between two feisty women when it is taken to new levels of intensity by […]
Manners maketh the doctor
The other day I made a call to our local hospital to ask a colleague to see a patient of mine as a matter of urgency. I asked the switchboard operator to page the relevant on-call registrar who duly appeared on the other end of the line. Using “hello?” as his tense, inpatient, opening gambit […]
When is dementia not dementia: a lesson in listening
In the last few weeks, working as a GP, it seems like I’ve seen more pneumonia and bronchitis than at any time in the last 20 years. As a practice, we’ve also had a number of our elderly patients admitted as emergencies, sometimes after seeing one of us and sometimes when they’ve sought hospital care […]
Sex, suicide and surgical blues: getting under the skin of Grey’s Anatomy
I’d always hoped that one day I’d finally get to grips with the contents of Gray’s Anatomy. Perhaps then I’d be able to write the sort of blog my friend Babette- a sport’s physician- would like me to write. To quote Babette, she’d like me to write something “simple, like sports, or the athlete’s heart, […]
Human Identity in the Age of Bio-science: two gems from Radio 4
As civilians in both Gaza and Israel spend another day living and dying in fear and surrounded by hate, Ali Abbas, a young man who as a child lost 16 members of his family and both his arms in the Iraq conflict, tells reporter Hugh Sykes his story. Ali’s story reminds us of the human […]