Article Summary by Ben Rutter and Rodney Hermeston Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) is one of the most prominent novels to feature a character with Parkinson’s Disease. In this paper we look at the language used by Franzen to capture Parkinson’s Disease and to describe the protagonist Alfred Lambert. We use linguistic analysis to consider […]
Latest articles
‘This Place Is Not for Children Like Her’: Disability, Ambiguous Belonging and the Claiming of Disadvantage in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Article Summary by Michelle Botha and Brian Watermeyer This paper explores ideas about disability, identity and belonging in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. The first author (MB) reflects on the intersection of disability, gender, race and language in her experience. The paper revolves around MB’s recollection of her first year of primary school which […]
Eggs, Sugar, Grated Bones: Colour-Based Food Preferences in Autism, Eating Disorders, and Beyond
Article Summary by Mattias Strand This article explores colour-based food preferences and selective eating, with a focus on autism spectrum disorder and so-called avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID)—an eating disorder characterized by restrictive eating in the absence of body image concerns. As many parents can testify, it is immensely common for children to display patterns […]
What is the Cultural Value of Dying in an Era of Assisted Dying?
Article Summary by Naomi Richards and Marian Krawczyk Assisted dying—the ability to be assisted by a medical professional to end your life at a time of your choosing – is now available in a number of jurisdictions around the world, for those who satisfy the criteria. This paper raises the question of whether dying will […]
Trauma–Aware Care
Blog by Lily Kim While chairing Holocaust Education Week (UJA Federation) and leading Equity for the Canadian Disability Studies Association (CDSA), I recognized the need to reconcile diverse intersectional perspectives in Canada. The current situation is widely viewed as a healthcare crisis brought about by the COVID-19 virus. However, the pandemic has revealed the existential […]
Bringing Narratives from Physicians, Patients and Caregivers Together: A Scoping Review of Published Research
Article Summary by Tracy Moniz Article by Tracy Moniz, John Costella, Maryam Golafshani, Chris Watling and Lorelei Lingard What can we learn from research that compares the stories that physicians, patients, and family caregivers write about their illness and care experiences? Our literature review sought to answer this question in hopes that a better understanding […]
Crisis
Blog by D. Brendan Johnson Medicine is at home among crises. Hippocrates, or one of his disciples, in the Corpus Hippocraticum was one of the first to conceptualize a crisis as a medical reality, and it was a concept upon which Galen would build and thereby preserve for 1500 years. For these classical physicians, the […]
The Fight Against Sexism in Science: International Women’s Day Featuring Scientist Rita Colwell
Welcome to the Medical Humanities podcast, where today we are pleased to have Rita Colwell join us for International Women’s Day! In addition to discussing the trials and successes of being a woman in science, she also talks to us about her new book A Lab of One’s Own. Rita Colwell is one of the […]
Apologies Alone Won’t Solve Structural Racism: We Need a Reckoning with the Racist Roots of U.S. Medicine
Response by Jacqueline Antonovich, Rana Hogarth, Elise Mitchell, Graham Mooney, Ayah Nuriddin, Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Kylie Smith, Christopher Willoughby and Alexandre White Recently, JAMA’s Clinical Reviews podcast recorded an episode with the Twitter headline: No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? The tweet is now deleted, and JAMA […]
Healthcare Providers’ Engagement with Eating Disorder Recovery Narratives: Opening to Complexity and Diversity
Article Summary by Andrea LaMarre and Carla Rice There is very little training around eating disorders across different areas and levels of healthcare. It is even less common to see training that shares the perspectives of people with lived experiences and their supporters with healthcare providers and healthcare provider trainees (HCPs). In this study, we […]