Blog by Allison Coffelt I’m sitting by my aunt, who drove two hours after work to see me while I’m in town. She comes straight from the office, and Saturday she’ll get up early to bale hay. At family dinner I ask, assuming yes: she’s vaccinated? Her laugh drops. “I decided not to.” The table […]
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Finding Hope through Understanding
Film Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent Spoiler alert: this review contains significant plot details. ‘Souad’ (Ayten Amin, Egypt, 2020) showing at UK cinemas from 27th August 2021, https://www2.bfi.org.uk/whats-on/bfi-film-releases/souad. Souad (Bassant Ahmed) is a 19-year-old girl who lives with her younger sister Rabab (Basmala El Ghaiesh), and their parents in Zagazig, a city […]
Medicine’s Disability Blind Spot: Vaccine Roll-out, Privilege, and Access
Podcast with Alice Wong and Alyssa Burgart Join EIC Brandy Schillace in conversation with Alice Wong, a disabled activist based in San Francisco and the founder of the Disability Visibility Project, and Alyssa Burgart, an anesthesiologist and ethicist at Stanford University. Disabled lives have long been overlooked, as the very systems and designs of medicine cater […]
Encountering Pain: Hearing, Seeing, Speaking
Book Review by Jennifer Bracken Scott Edited by Deborah Padfield and Joanna M. Zakrzewska ISBN: 9781787352636 UCL Press, 2021 Full text of book is available online at https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10120621/1/Encountering-Pain.pdf Pain is an important indicator that something is wrong in the body. But pain is also invisible and immeasurable to anyone besides the patient; while an […]
Sanatorium
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Abi Palmer. Penned in the Margins, 2020. 9781908058713 Teresa of Avila, the Saint Teresa immortalised by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s electrifying marble sculpture, was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and mystic. She became a local celebrity for her raptures, which, according to those who witnessed her ecstatic spiritual experiences, regularly involved […]
June 2021 Special Issue: Global Genetic Fictions
Global genetic fictions [read the article summary] by Clare Barker ‘More than biological’: Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves as Indigenous countergenetic fiction‘Between-time stories’: waiting, war and the temporalities of care by Shital Pravinchandra Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit [read the article summary] by Lara Choksey Reading heredity […]
March 2021 Issue
Can Death Cafés resuscitate morale in hospitals? [read the article summary] by Rachel Hammer, Nithya Ravindran, Nathan Nielsen ‘This place is not for children like her’: disability, ambiguous belonging and the claiming of disadvantage in postapartheid South Africa [read the article summary] by Michelle Botha and Brian Watermeyer Public health crises in popular media: how […]
Going Medieval: Historical Comparisons of Plague and Pandemic
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen a great number of comparisons made between this and other outbreaks. Sometimes, the 1918 flu gets top billing, other times is is cholera or typhus. But the benchmark for plague, in history and in popular imagination, still tends to be the Black Death, particularly the […]
Confronting Toxic Memories
Film review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine ‘Curfew’ (written and directed by Amir Ramses, Egypt, 2020). Spoiler alert: this review reveals significant plot details. Curfew is a stirring drama about parental sacrifice and the dynamics of reconciliation between a mother and daughter. Along the way, the clinical picture of childhood sexual abuse, its […]
A Call to End Violence Against Healthcare Professionals in Myanmar
Blog by Kaung Suu Lwin, Khin Thet Swe, Phyu Phyu Thin Zaw, Stuart Gilmour and Shuhei Nomura Escalating catastrophic human rights violations by Myanmar military is threatening health and human security of Myanmar people. Myanmar’s healthcare system is overwhelmed due to violence against healthcare professionals following the military coup. We are issuing a call to […]