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 […]
Latest articles
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 […]
‘The Internet Both Reassures and Terrifies’: Exploring the More-Than-Human Worlds of Health Information Using the Story Completion Method
Article Summary by Deborah Lupton This article reports the findings of a study using an innovative approach to understanding people’s beliefs and practices: the story completion method. This method asks people to complete story ‘stems’, writing about a fictional character. The completed narratives are then analysed for the shared cultural norms and discourses they revealed. […]
No Words: A Virtual Choir of Healthcare Workers Memorializes 500,000 Americans Lost to the Pandemic
Announcement by The Nocturnists The U.S. has reached half a million deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic. To mark this moment, The Nocturnists medical storytelling community has created No Words, a video memorial honoring those lost to the pandemic and the healthcare workers who cared for them. No Words Memorial Video: https://bit.ly/TheNocturnists_NoWords No Words Webpage: https://thenocturnists.com/no-words […]
Women, the State and Film Activism
Film Festival Announcement by Khalid Ali The 25th Human Rights Watch Film Festival, UK Digital Edition, Barbican Cinema On Demand, 18–26 March 2021, https://ff.hrw.org/london Reproductive rights and the right to family, survivors of rape and access to healthcare are the focus of several documentaries in the 25th edition of Human Rights Watch Film Festival taking place from 18-26 March, presented exclusively on the […]