Making Space for Students from Widening Access Backgrounds: Socioeconomic Diversity, Historical Contexts, and the Need for Reimagining of Criteria and Culture within Medical Education

Blog by Kasey Johnson Students from widening access (WA) backgrounds, contribute unique strengths to medicine and are an investment in the most vulnerable communities, yet recruiting and retaining WA students continue to be a challenge for most medical schools. Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) data shows that only 5% of medical school matriculants are […]

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Recovery, Hope and Renewal in Post-COVID World

Press release from Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent Lost Connections Archive-based film (UK, 2021). An echo of our contemporary experiences, Lost Connections is a new archive-based film which gives future hope by connecting with the past. The film includes a remarkable selection of footage and voices collected over a century. In its imaginative way, […]

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The Rationales for and Challenges with Employing Arts-based Health Services Research (ABHSR): A Qualitative Systematic Review of Primary Studies

Article Summary by Umair Majid We conducted a systematic review of 42 studies to identify the rationales for using arts-based research in health care. We found four rationales: (1) capture aspects of a topic that may be overlooked or ignored by other methods, (2) allow participants to reflect on their own experiences, (3) generate valuable […]

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Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

Book Review By Matthew Harris Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the anatomy of injustice. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. ISBN: 9780374602512, 496 Pages. The central plea in Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s Inflamed is to have the reader acknowledge that colonial capitalism, which separates society from nature, subverts the holism required […]

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A Mirror in Fiction: Drawing Parallelisms Between Camus’s La Peste and COVID-19

Article Summary by César Pérez Romero Fiction is a particular mirror of reality. It does not look to merely reflect it: it tries to enhance it in order to build art from it. Nowadays, when the entire world faces an unprecedented public health crisis (COVID-19), taking a look at fiction about epidemics constitutes a highly […]

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Representing Young Men’s Experience of Anorexia Nervosa A French-Language Case Study

Article Summary by Katie Jones This article analyses two young adult (YA) novels about young men’s experience of anorexia nervosa (AN), within the dual contexts of medical humanities research into literary depictions of illness, and the broader field of young adult literature about AN. While emphasising the importance of diverse literary narratives in order to […]

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A Journey of Self-Acceptance

Film Review by Robert Abrams Review of Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, documentary directed by Ric Burns (Steeplechase Films, USA, 2019) Screening for one night only special event in UK and Irish cinemas on 29th September. For tickets and more information, https://www.altitude.film/movies/tag/coming-soon Oliver Sacks: His Own Life bears the key hallmarks of a Ric Burns […]

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“From Disaster, Miracles are Wrought”: A Narrative Analysis of UK Media Depictions of Remote GP Consulting in the Covid-19 Pandemic Using Burke’s Pentad

Article Summary by Gilly Mroz This study used narrative analysis (the study of stories and storytelling) to explore how the mainstream media reacted to the shift from face-to-face to remote medical consultations during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. We used a conceptual framework developed some years ago by the literary theorist Kenneth Burke, which […]

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