Laura Bisaillon, Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience (UBC Press, 2022, 288 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0774867481). Book review by Kevin Madill Laura Bisaillon’s Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience is a pioneering examination of how Canada’s immigration policies intersect with HIV testing. Bisaillon offers an in-depth analysis of how these […]
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Dementia and Processing Trauma through Art
Blog by Beatrice O’ Shea F. Van Abeelen (1933-2016), a Dutch man with dementia, made the same drawing, of the same crack in a wall, countless times in the last few years of his life. He used coloured pencils or markers, which give the images a childlike nature and simplicity. Little can be found about […]
Healing the Lived Body
Drew Leder, The Healing Body: Creative Responses to Illness, Aging, and Affliction (Northwestern University Press, 2023, 240 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0810146389). Book Review by Matthew Swanson Too often, medical care is offered and experienced as a form of expert technical intervention. Doctors perceive the patient in the role of a passive recipient, and we comply. Dr. […]
Public Health and the “Disease” of Violence: A Retrospective
Blog by Sophie Franklin Part of the Public Health Humanities Series And if disease is violence, and yet is within human control, is it not true that violence itself, at least, to some extent, is susceptible of being removed? –William A. Alcott1 The question of whether violence can be eradicated like a disease may seem […]
Artificial Wombs are Coming. Are We Ready for Their Effects?
Laura Johnson Dahlke, Outer Origin: A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of Human Experience (Pickwick Publications, 2024. ISBN-13: 978-1666772104). Book Review by Erika Warbinton Laura Johnson Dahlke’s Outer Origin: A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of Human Experience is an essential read for anyone interested in artificial womb technology and its implications for […]
Remembering Patients Together
Blog by Eileen Barrett About fifteen years ago, I attended a patient’s funeral mass and was touched to hear her family mention me in the eulogy. I felt honored and grateful, but also a little embarrassed because I had treated her and her family the way any of my colleagues would have during her care. […]
Metaphors in the Care of Pediatric Sexual Abuse Survivors
Blog by Aanya Ravichander Metaphors may be as necessary to illness as they are to literature, as comforting to the patient as his own bathrobe and slippers. —Anatole Broyard1 Studies show that patients communicate better with physicians who use metaphors.2 Metaphors not only subconsciously influence our thinking, they determine how we approach obstacles, conceptualize […]
Why Public Health Information Should Incorporate Socio-cultural Insights
Blog by Rui Liu and Susanne Lundin The COVID-19 pandemic brought up many public health challenges, including a lack of knowledge about how the public tackles health worries on an everyday basis. People were concerned about whether face masks would work, whether home remedies of various kinds could help, and about how to get vaccinated. […]
‘What’s a D and C Between Friends?’ Space, Intimacy and the Medicalisation of Unmotherhood in Modernist Literature
Article Summary by Kate Schnur This article explores the representations of different experiences of “unmotherhood” are represented in literature of the twentieth century. As this special issue explores the conditions of modernity that shape maternity, I ask how are the conditions of living outside of motherhood similarly shaped by those same conditions? I look to […]
“Our Culture is Changing Its Mind”: Assisted Dying and the Value of Old Age
Blog by James Aaron Green In a recent Times article, the columnist Matthew Parris argues that it is time to lift the taboo on assisted dying in cases of “extreme senescence.”1 This call for what amounts to voluntary euthanasia—for each person to recognise ‘“Your time is up”’—was “widely condemned” for its reductive, dehumanizing verdict upon […]