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 […]
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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 […]
Storytelling Ethics
Blog by Lillian Wieland Medical school interviews loom ahead, making applicants scramble to prepare. We’ll go to our advisors, asking “What will give me an edge?” In return, we might hear the common advice to write down all of our patient interaction stories and craft a narrative on how those experiences impacted us as future […]
Reflections on PRIDE 2021: Intersectional Identities
Blog by Henry Ng, MD, MPH (he/they) Millions of people celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride month every June in the United States and around the world. As we emerge from the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and begin to congregate and celebrate our lives and selves, our jubilance is tempered by sobering statistics from the pandemic on […]
Drawing Attention to and Restoring Order in ADHD
‘Take Care of Zizi’ (TV Series, directed by Karim El Shennawy, Egypt, 2021) Mariam Naoum, Mona El Shimi and Magdy Amin (TV script writers) in conversation with Khalid Ali, film, and media correspondent In the critically acclaimed Arab TV series ‘Take Care of Zizi’,. Zizi (Amina Khalil) is a young […]
Politics of Difference and Grammars of Influence in the Postgenomic Era: Fire, Soil, Spirit
Article Summary by Lara Choksey The great and humbling lesson of the Human Genome Project was that histories of embodiment are complex social matters. The era in the life sciences imperfectly described as the postgenomic, the period ‘after’ the sequencing of the human genome, has involved a turn to the effects of influences external to […]
Time Considered as a Helix of Infinite Possibilities
Article Summary by Jay Clayton This contribution to the special issue of Medical Humanities on Global Genetic Fictions focuses on an award-winning science fiction story by Samuel R. Delany, “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” In the story, Delany imagines something he calls “hologramic information storage,” which allows an interplanetary Special Service agent […]
Painful Metaphors: Enactivism and Art in Qualitative Research
Article Summary by Peter Stilwell There is now widespread consensus that pain is subjective, meaning that it is a private and personal experience. Because pain is experienced from a person’s unique perspective, others (e.g., healthcare practitioners, family, friends) cannot directly “see” or fully understand what the experience is like. To somewhat express what it is […]
Diagnosis: Truth and Tales
Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Jutel, Annemarie Goldstein. Diagnosis: Truth and Tales. University of Toronto Press, 2019. In a short verse from his posthumous collection Falling Ill (2016), American poet C. K. Williams offered a richly ambiguous representation of his experience receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. The poem, “Diagnosis,” begins with a coherent reflection on […]