Article Summary by Jasmine Yong Hall Frankenstein is generally taken as a cautionary tale of scientific arrogance. The moral is not to “play God” or to go beyond the boundaries of nature. However, what is being described is really a fear of unintended consequences which can be mitigated through better understanding and better control. Scientists […]
Latest articles
March 2022 Issue
March 2022 Issue Disability, relationship, and the negotiation of loss [read the article summary] Brian Watermeyer, Victor Mckinney Health awareness as genre: the exigence of preparedness in cancer awareness campaigns and critical-illness insurance marketing Loren Gaudet From blocked flows to suppressed emotions: the life of a trope [read the article summary] Stewart Justman Health, well-being, […]
Nations Must be Defended: Public Health, Enmity, and Immunity in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India
Article Summary by Sandhya Shetty The article published in Medical Humanities (special issue on Global Health) is one harvest of my longstanding engagement with Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), a uniquely ill-natured attempt to turn the tide of interwar British imperial history. The article draws materials from a longer book project that seeks new ways […]
Sea of Bodies a Medical Discourse of the Refugee Crisis in Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story
Article Summary by Lava Asaad and Matthew Spencer In the memoir Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story, Pietro Bartolo (2018) relates visceral descriptions of illness, injury, and death endured by refugees on their journey of escape to the shores of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean. The medical gaze of the doctor/author further complicates the political and […]
Writing the Worlds of Genomic Medicine: Experiences of Using Participatory-Writing to Understand Life with Rare Conditions
Article Summary by Richard Gorman and Bobbie Farsides Our article, ‘Writing the Worlds of Genomic Medicine: Experiences of Using Participatory-Writing to Understand Life with Rare Conditions’ is part of our work on the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Ethical Preparedness in Genomic Medicine’ research project at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. We’ve been working with a group […]
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and the Pathologization and Medicalization of Ordinary Experiences
Article Summary by Sahanika Ratnayake In the wake of prolonged grief disorder entering the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, debates over the pathologizing and medicalizing of ordinary experiences—that is, presenting what we might think of as typical experiences such as grief as disorders requiring specialised treatment—have reignited. Psychiatry of course has a long history […]
Finding Hope in Dementia
Film Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York Vortex is everything its title implies—a terrifying eddy of misfortune from which its victims are powerless to escape. It is all about the ravages of dementia, the destruction of the human mind and its effect on those who love the person so afflicted. The […]
Celebrating Cultural Diversity through Film
Neus Ballús, Catalan film maker, discusses her film ‘The Odd Job Men’ (Spain 2021) with Khalid Ali, film, and media correspondent On the 21st of May 2022, the United Nations celebrate the ‘World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development’. The Day was declared by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2002 […]
Renaissance Medicine: A Short History of European Medicine in the Sixteenth Century
Book review by Katherine D. Van Schaik Vivian Nutton. Renaissance Medicine: A Short History of European Medicine in the Sixteenth Century. Routledge, 2022. Vivian Nutton’s comprehensive Renaissance Medicine: A Short History of European Medicine in the Sixteenth Century, written largely during the pandemic, provides an overview of a century of medical transformations in Europe. Nutton […]
Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook
Book Review by Neil Vickers Iain Bamforth is a physician-writer who tries to understand his life in terms of philosophy, literature, history and art. He is stupendously well-read in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish sources, which he deploys to beguiling effect in this strange and magnificent book. In a ‘Preface’ to Scattered Limbs, Bamforth […]