Film Review by Franco Ferrarini, gastroenterologist, and film reviewer ‘Empire of Light’, Sam Mendes, UK, 2022 Set in the early 80’s, Hilary (Olivia Colman) is a middle-aged woman working as a duty-manager at the “Empire”, a movie theatre in Margate, Kent. ‘’Find where light in darkness lies’’ is the caption from Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ […]
Latest articles
Patients Making Meaning: Theorizing Sources of Information and Forms of Support in Women’s Health
Blog by Bryna Siegel Finer, Cathryn Molloy, and Jamie White-Farnham Patients suffer when they do not get the information and support that they need—particularly when they are faced with a health flashpoint, which we define in our work as a new diagnosis, a flare or worsening of an existing condition, or the point at which […]
Making Space for Disability Studies within a Structurally Competent Medical Curriculum: Reflections on Long Covid
Article Summary by Joanne Hunt This article makes a case for integrating knowledge and tools from the discipline of disability studies into undergraduate medical school curricula, with a view to encouraging critically informed, structurally competent medical education and practice. Here, ‘structural competency’ refers to the recognition that both health and healthcare are influenced by social […]
Making Modern Maternity: Special Issue CFP
We invite submissions to a special journal issue that we would like to propose to Medical Humanities on the topic “Making Modern Maternity.” Our aim for the special issue will be to explore the ways in which pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal experiences have been constructed as “modern” (or not) at multiple sites and through various […]
Somewhere Out There in a Place No One Knows: Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and the Literature of Forgetting
Article Summary by John Henning This essay reads Yoko Ogawa’s 1994 novel, The Memory Police, as a subtle allegory for the progression dementia and other neurological disorders. In Ogawa’s book, inhabitants of an unnamed island suffer a series of ‘disappearances’. At the same time on random days, they forget about things like birds, hats, roses, […]
(De)Troubling Transparency: Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Clinical Applications
Article Summary by Peter David Winter and Annamaria Carusi Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a powerful and prominent tool in medical research, but its acceptance in hospitals remains low due to the lack of transparency associated with these technologies. This article examines how including clinicians and clinical scientists in the collaborative practices of AI developers […]
Bubbles and Lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand: The Language of Self-Isolation in #Covid19nz Tweets
Article Summary by Jessie Burnette and Maebh Long In this paper, we explore two different ways that New Zealand Twitter users framed their experience of government COVID-19 measures during the first stage of the pandemic. When the first cases of COVID-19 were discovered in Aotearoa New Zealand during March 2020, the government quickly moved to […]
The Jew’s Penis: Circumcision and Sexual Pathology in Eighteenth-Century England
Article Summary by Noelle Gallagher This paper explores the contradictory prejudices against circumcision and Jewish male sexual behaviour that were circulating in English medical and popular discourse between 1660 and 1800. For centuries, Jewish men had been labelled as, on the one hand, lustful sexual predators, and on the other hand, harmless emasculated weaklings. I […]
Of Not Passing: Homelessness, Addiction, Mental Health and Care During Covid-19
Article Summary by Johannes Lenhard, Meg Margetts and Eana Meng People experiencing homelessness in the UK were unexpectedly and unconditionally offered housing (and support) from the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020. For many, that meant ‘(re)entering’ the support system and having a chance to ‘move on’ to longer-term housing. This beneficial effect […]
Understanding the Complexities of Dementia: A Personal and Scientific Journey
Book Review by Agustin Ibanez Cindy Weinstein, Bruce L. Miller. Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. 216 pp. ISBN 978-1421441269. In the summer of 2010, I moved to a beautiful apartment in the affluent Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was hoping […]