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 […]
Latest articles
‘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 […]
What is an Adverse Event in a Clinical Trial?
Blog by Thomas Milovac Kow and colleagues have recently addressed the lack of quality in reporting adverse events (AEs) in trials of remdesivir, basing their analysis on guidelines recommended by the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT).1 For example, none of the trials defined an AE, and only one trial noted how researchers collected AE […]
The Song of Our Scars: Exploring the Social and Scientific Fundamentals of Chronic Pain
Book Review by Vishal Khetpal The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain. Haider Warraich. Basic Books. ISBN 9781541675308. Skim through any bestseller list in adult non-fiction these days and you will find books that grapple with pain and chronic illness. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps Score maps the landscape of […]
Body Talk: “Corporeal Pedagogies” with Dr Sally Waite and Dr Olivia Turner
Podcast with Dr. Sally Waite and Dr. Olivia Turner In this podcast episode, Drs. Sally Waite and Olivia Turner share what it means to do “corporeal pedagogy,” a form of learning and teaching that suspends conventional modes of Western education, particularly within a university setting, to facilitate embodied and haptic learning and productions of knowledge. […]
The World Enters Our Playroom: Music and Family in the Time of COVID
Blog by Astrid de Oliveira (née Treffry-Goatley) The outside world enters our playroom, the room with the best light and internet connection in the house. The children’s bookshelf becomes the backdrop to countless television interviews, zoom calls and meetings with world leaders. In hard lockdown, which started on 27 March 2020, we suddenly morph into […]
Posthumanism and the LivingBodiesObject Project
Podcast with Stuart Murray and Amelia DeFalco in conversation with EIC Brandy Schillace Today we are pleased to speak with Stuart Murray, Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film, and Amelia DeFalco, Associate Professor of Medical Humanities in the School of English, University of Leeds. We at Medical Humanities have been following a new project they […]