The heart in medicine, history and culture [read the article summary] Therese Feiler, Joshua Hordern Sacred hearts and pumps: cardiology and the conflicted body politic (1500–1900) Therese Feiler The haunted heart and the Holy Ghost: on retrieval, donation and death [read the article summary] Joshua Hordern Heart surgery and transplantation: innovations impacting on concepts of […]
Latest articles
December 2021 Special Issue: Transplantation and its Imaginaries
Transplantation: changing biotechnologies and imaginaries Donna McCormack, Margrit Shildrick Hauntological dimensions of heart transplantation: the onto-epistemologies of deceased donation Margrit Shildrick The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities Donna McCormack Faecal microbiota transplants: towards a healthy disgust scepticism Jessica Houf ‘Dirty pigs’ and the xenotransplantation paradox Gill Haddow May I have your […]
Infectious Disease Epidemics and Inequality
EIC Brandy Schillace Interviews John Wright On today’s Medical Humanities podcast, we have author, doctor and epidemiologist John Wright, director of the Bradford Institute for Health Research. You might know him for his books Magic and Medicine: Tales from a Rural African Hospital, or the intense Ebola Diaries, but today we are talking about his […]
Elham Shahin’s Recipe for Women’s Welfare and Social Reform
Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent ‘Film Legends Among Us’ series The Arts Council of England’s model for measuring the impact of creative people encompasses three fundamental principles: actions, themes, and outcomes. Applying this model to the artistic career of the eminent Egyptian actress and producer, Elham Shahin, one can appreciate her influential position in […]
June 2022 Special Issue: Global Health Humanities
Global Health Humanities in transition Narin Hassan, Jessica Howell Sea of bodies: a medical discourse of the refugee crisis in Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story [read the article summary] Lava Asaad, Matthew Spencer Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India [read the article summary] Sandhya Shetty Xenotransplantation […]
‘Film Legends Among Us’: New Series in Medical Humanities Online Blogs
Brandy Schillace, Editor-in-chief, Medical Humanities Journal Lambert Wilson, French actor and musician, and master of ceremonies at his opening speech for the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 said: ‘The world is written in an incomprehensible language, but cinema translates it for us universally. Without its guiding light, each person would remain in isolated darkness’’. Medical […]
‘Creative Ferment’: Abortion and Reproductive Agency in Bessie Head’s Personal Choices Trilogy
Article Summary by Caitlin Stobie Using original archival research, this article examines representations of abortion in three novels by Bessie Head, an author who was born in South Africa and lived in Botswana for most of her life. I argue that Head documents both changing attitudes to terminations of pregnancy and dramatic environmental, medical, and […]
In “Torlak” We (Would) Trust: Domestic Vaccine Production in Contemporary Serbia
Article Summary by Marija Brujić An overly positive memory of life in socialist Yugoslavia, called Yugonostalgia, is very dominant among the public in contemporary Serbian post-socialist society. People who used to live in former Yugoslavia still talk with pride about the quality of life during that time, including the quality of its health system and […]
Building Compassionate Communities
Book review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York. Walk with the Weary: Lessons in Humanity in Health Care, Dr M.R. Rajagopal, Notion Press, Chennai, India, 2022. Walk with the Weary by Dr M.R. Rajagopal is an account of how one physician moved from a career in anesthesiology to a lifetime mission […]
The Impostor Nurse and the Charlatan Doctor
Film Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent ‘Face and Back’ (Weish wa Dhahr) TV mini-series (directed by Mariam Abou Ouf, Egypt, 2022) available on https://shahid.mbc.net/ar (Arabic with English subtitles) The health of any society is strongly influenced by the socioeconomic status, and cultural, and spiritual beliefs of its population. These factors inform the […]