Article Summary by Charlotte Greenhalgh ‘The Right Time’ draws on unique, grassroots survey research on New Zealand women’s decisions to delay childbearing and become parents after the age of 30. These 1980s studies and their archived research papers spotlight participants’ determination to time childbearing to coincide with financial stability, strong romantic partnerships, and sufficient personal […]
Latest articles
“The Highest in Each Class was a Twilight Baby”: Scientific Motherhood, Twilight Sleep and the Eugenics Movement in McClure’s Magazine
Article Summary by Jerika Sanderson and Heather A. Love This article investigates the depiction of twilight sleep in McClure’s Magazine. Twilight sleep was a drug cocktail and medical procedure popularized during the mid-1910s in the United States as a way to reduce or eliminate women’s pain during childbirth; it became an important symbol of agency […]
#Headlesspreggos: Challenging Visual Imaginaries of Pregnancy and Reproduction
Article Summary by Alana Cattapan and Danielle Mastromatteo Images of headless pregnant women—what we call “headless preggos”—are frequently used to illustrate online news content on pregnancy and reproduction. In our article, “#Headlesspreggos: Challenging visual imaginaries of pregnancy and reproduction,” we explore the meaning of these images through our experiences documenting headless preggos on Twitter from […]
Motherhood, Wet-Nursing and Nation: Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medical Perspectives
Article Summary by Tiago Fernandes Maranhão The paper explores how doctors in nineteenth-century Brazil viewed women’s roles, especially in terms of having and raising children. It looks at their ideas about pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the use of enslaved wet nurses during a time when the country was trying to modernize. It also examines issues like […]
“How Much Would They Give for a Heart?”
Film Review by Robert Abrams, Emeritus Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York ‘Dirty Difficult Dangerous’ (Wissam Charaf, Lebanon, 2023) Dirty Difficult Dangerous opens as Ahmed (Ziad Jallad), a young Syrian refugee, walks the streets of Beirut, calling out the Arabic refrain of “Iron! Copper! Batteries” in the hope of exchanging old metal parts for cash. […]
The Big Heroine Genre: Motherhood and the Maternal Body in Postsocialist Chinese Television
Article summary by Chelsea Wenzhu Xu This article explores the “big heroine” drama genre, a new type of television show in China that tells powerful and dramatic stories of urban women. By examining this genre through multiple lenses—cultural studies, Marxist theory, feminist film and media studies, and medical humanities—the article analyzes how these shows critique […]
You and Your Baby (Home, Husband, and Doctor)
Article Summary by Kate Errington You and Your Baby was a pregnancy advice booklet, produced by the British Medical Association (BMA) from 1957–1987. This booklet was provided to expectant mothers in the UK, free of charge, and offered authoritative information on pregnancy, childbirth and caring for infants. But, in addition to the typical information you […]
Talking about Menopause and Health with the MenoMakers Craft Group
Blog by Jessica Hammett, University of Bristol, jessica.hammett@bristol.ac.uk What’s the relationship between the humanities and public health—rather than medicine? Public health typically focuses on populations rather than individuals, and on the prevention of illness and promotion of health and wellbeing. Sometimes seen as a ‘poor relation’ to biomedicine, it has enjoyed new prominence and recognition […]
Humanising Care for Older People Living with Dementia: Teun Toebes in conversation with Khalid Ali
Podcast with Tuen Toebes In this podcast Teun Toebes reflects on how, as a 21-year old nursing student, he wanted to know more about the life of older people living with dementia in a care home in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Moving in as one of the housemate in a care home, and not as […]
“Pennies from Heaven”: Resilience in the Time of Covid
‘Back Home’ (Sara Shazli, Egypt, 2021) Film Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Emeritus Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York As with all good art, the film Back Home can offer rewards from more than one perspective, but to this viewer the film is chiefly the portrait of a resilient older man who employs self-deprecating […]