Book Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Stern, Joseph D. Grief Connects Us: A Neurosurgeon’s Lessons on Love, Loss, and Compassion. Central Recovery Press, 2021. Joseph Stern’s recent book, Grief Connects Us, opens with a study in contrasts. “My younger sister was an actress,” Stern writes. She was creative, trusting, warm, an engaged wife and […]
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Movement of Knowledge: Medical Humanities Perspectives on Medicine, Science, and Experience
Book Review by Isobel Newby Hansson, Kristofer and Rachel Irwin, editors. Movement of Knowledge: Medical Humanities Perspectives on Medicine, Science, and Experience. Nordic Academic Press, 2020. Movement of Knowledge, edited by Kristofer Hansson and Rachel Irwin, is the result of a collaborative effort by the Cultural Studies Group of Neuroscience at Lund University. Indeed, multidisciplinary […]
How I Lost My Mother: A Story of Life, Care and Dying by Leslie Swartz
Book Review by Ken Junior Lipenga Leslie Swartz. How I Lost My Mother: A Story of Life, Care and Dying. Wits University Press, 2021. 222 pages. There are multiple angles from which one could approach Leslie Swartz’s latest life writing publication, How I Lost My Mother: A Story of Life, Care and Dying. The […]
Angels of Death: When Healthcare Professionals become Murderers
Film Review by Franco Ferrarini, Introduced by Khalid Ali Healthcare professionals, especially doctors and nurses, have public trust to do the best for their patients when these patients are most vulnerable. Saving lives, maintaining patients’ safety and dignity are core principles of the care profession. Unfortunately, widely publicized cases have shown that some doctors can […]
The Rehabilitation of Long Covid Requires Understanding of Not Just the Biomedical Dimensions But All Aspects of Being Human
Blog by Amali U. Lokugamage and Clare Rayner We are both senior doctors affected by multi-system long covid symptoms for almost two years now and have resorted to biomedical, humanities, artistic and complementary methods to support rehabilitation and recovery. We used art and poetry and meditation despite illness. These helped us communicate and make sense […]
Talking it Better: Conversations and Normative Complexity in Healthcare Improvement
Article Summary by Alan Cribb No doubt everyone would agree that conversations are valuable. Amongst other things they are one of the ways we can attend to, appreciate and learn from one another. This, of course, is relevant to practical activities like healthcare improvement. Healthcare improvement typically involves technical or formally specified processes working alongside […]
The Body Politic: A Review of Cells at Work!, vols. 1-6
Book Review by A. David Lewis Shimizu, A. (2015). Cells at Work!, Volume 1. New York: Kodansha. 978-1-63236-356-5 Shimizu, A. (2016). Cells at Work!, Volume 2. New York: Kodansha. 978-1-63236-357-2 Shimizu, A. (2017). Cells at Work!, Volume 3. New York: Kodansha. 978-1-63236-390-9 Shimizu, A. (2017). Cells at Work!, Volume 4. New York: Kodansha. 978-1-63236-391-6 Shimizu, A. (2017). Cells at Work!, Volume 5. New York: Kodansha. […]
The Dying Patient: Taboo, Controversy and Missing Terms of Reference for Designers—An Architectural Perspective
Article Summary by Annie Bellamy Our societies have become more and more removed from the realities of growing old and dying. The language surrounding death, dying and who the ‘patient’ really is has become clouded and confusing, which has only been made worse by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Language and key terms of […]
Straight Talk: Call It By Its Name
Film Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York Review of ‘Tacheles—The Heart of the Matter’, directed by Jana Matthes and Andrea Schramm (Germany, 2020), screened at the London Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In ‘Tacheles—The Heart of the Matter’, Yaar Harell, the real-life twenty-something grandson of Holocaust survivors, is troubled by […]
Health, Well-being, and Material-Ideal Hybrid Spaces in Yeats’s Writing
Article Summary by Tudor Balinisteanu The medical humanities research carried out in our Neuroaesthetics Lab at University of Suceava asks whether art that engenders awareness of one’s embodied life is healthier than art that fosters statuary ideals. We argue that sacrificing mindfulness of one’s own embodied life in favour of spiritual or idealistic purpose can […]