Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York Review of ‘This Little Life’ (directed by Sarah Gavron, UK 2003) ‘This Little Life’ explores several timeless themes; it focuses on parental attachment and mourning in the specific circumstances raised by the birth of a premature infant and shines no less a revealing light on […]
Latest articles
So Much More Than a Headache: Understanding Migraine through Literature
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Kathleen J. O’Shea. The Kent State University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-60635-403-2 Can language ever fully represent pain? Much writing about illness returns us to that question, including two books published this year: Pain: The Science of the Feeling Brain and Ouch!: Why Pain Hurts, and Why It Doesn’t Have […]
What a Year of Pandemic Isolation Taught Me About My Transition
by Riley Black Hormone replacement therapy is a slow form of magic. Very little physical exertion is needed – in my case, little more than twisting open a prescription bottle – but patience is a virtue you learn if you don’t already have it at the start. From the time I took my first doses […]
Can Death Cafés Resuscitate Morale in Hospitals?
Article Summary by Rachel Hammer Death Cafés are non-profit social franchises that arise spontaneously in communities to serve as informal forums for discussing death. There is a great need within the medical community for the kind of conversation that Death Cafés foster: open, unstructured, spontaneous, genuine and interdisciplinary dialogue. This paper describes a model for […]
On the Need for an Ecologically Dimensioned Medical Humanities
Article Summary by Jonathan Coope Healthcare often tends to be compartmentalized as something quite separate from issues of ecology and ecological sustainability. Yet health impacts of global warming and other environmental problems alert us to the fact that health and the fate of the biosphere are inextricably related and always have been. Yet western modernity, […]
Noah Webster, Yellow Fever, and the First U.S. Medical Journal
Blog by Richard Kahn Yellow Jack, Yellow Plague, Bronze John – these words struck terror in the citizens of a newly formed republic. Yellow fever in the 1790s was a “disease of unknown cause, curious almost haphazard spread, short duration, and often a high fatality rate. It died out soon after a frost and did […]
‘Look Under the Sheets!’ Fighting with the Senses in Relation to Defecation and Bodily Care in Hospitals and Care Institutions
Article Summary by Sjaak van der Geest and Shahaduz Zaman Studies of hospital care pay little attention to unpleasant experiences of nurses and patients with regard to dirt and defecation. Disgust and embarrassment about dirt complicate the work of nurses and the well-being of patients. In this article we focus on conditions of hospital care […]
Prioritizing Justice in the U.S. Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Blog by Sarah E. Rowan, Michelle Haas, Lilia Cervantes, Kellie Hawkins, Lilian Barahona Vargas, David Duarte-Corado, Alonzo Ryan and Carlos Franco-Paredes Days ago, a clinician in Denver looked with anger at a patient who laid dying in the ICU. “Why didn’t she access care earlier? There are resources available and now she’s dying!” The patient […]
The Concept of ‘Illness Without Disease’ Impedes Understanding of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Response to Sharpe and Greco
Article Summary by Steven Lubet and David Tuller Today we present the very last of MH essays on CFS. The medical condition known as “chronic fatigue syndrome” has often been presumed to be primarily caused by psychological and behavioural factors, and therefore “reversible” by cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) or graded exercise therapy (GET). In 2015, […]
The Value of Evaluation: Differential Attainment Initiatives for BAME Trainees
Blog by Sharon Yip Talk of access to public institutions such as healthcare has been amplified in recent months, due to the Black Lives Matter movement. However, less discussion has been focussed on internal access for staff members working within medicine. Many initiatives aim to improve access to medical education and reduce differential attainment for […]