‘The Mole Agent’ (Maite Alberdi, Chile, 2020), in UK cinemas and on-demand form Friday 11th December 2020, distributed by Dogwoof Khalid Ali’s selection for the best documentary film in 2020 Documentary film is a genre that a regular film viewer might find difficult to enjoy on a Saturday film-night out. Maite Alberdi challenges those prejudices […]
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Book Review: Helen King, “Hippocrates now: the ‘father of medicine’ in the internet age”
by Owen Rees Helen King. Hippocrates now: the “father of medicine” in the internet age. Bloomsbury studies in classical reception. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 262 p. ISBN 9781350005891 Medicine and the internet have always had an uneasy relationship, with ‘Dr Google’ regularly prophesising doom to any unsuspecting enquirer typing in their symptoms. For […]
Belonging
by Eunice Stallman, MD I had just received a call that I had been accepted to medical school. The first thing I did was to call my significant other to share the exciting news. The second thing I did was pull up google to search, “best time to have children in medical training?” I was certain […]
Announcements: Conversations in Time of Crisis (Association for Medical Humanities)
We find ourselves in crisis. In times of crisis, action is at once indispensable and impossible, demanding a whole focus of attention while being dependent on events resolving themselves, requiring front-line workers to intervene while knowing themselves to have severely limited influence and agency. The front line is essentially a conversation with often unknown and […]
Book Review: “Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History”
by Manali Karmakar Virdi, Jaipreet. Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. 319 pp. Jaipreet Virdi’s Hearing Happiness dives deep into the existential and embodied anxieties of deaf individuals by tracing the evolution of deafness cures from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-first Century. Virdi’s book, on the one […]
Whither Medical Professionalism
by Daniel Skinner The ongoing pandemic and the many failures of leadership we’ve witnessed over the past few months have moved me to reflect on the meaning of so-called professionalism. We’ve certainly seen the heroization of medical professionals working in hospitals around the U.S. But, as this translates to the training of future physicians, are […]
Review: “Moving Worlds” Special Issue on Literature, Medicine, Health
by Jeffrey M. Brown “Literature, Medicine, Health [Special Issue].” Moving Worlds 19.2 (2019) A recent volume of Moving Worlds begins with a short poem by UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage entitled “Finishing It.” “I can’t configure / a tablet / chiselled by God’s finger / or forge / a scrawled prescription,” the poet admits; instead, […]
Death Penalty in Times of COVID-19
by Carlos Franco-Paredes MD, MPH and Vanessa Kung MD, MPH The death penalty is part of the history of racial discrimination in the United States and oppressive structures along with slavery, lynchings, and racial segregation.1,2 Over time, dramatic supreme justice decisions have led to controversial views surrounding its legality and morality.3,4 The advent in the 1980s […]
On valuing data virtuously
by Bharadwaj V. Chada As has often been the case throughout its esteemed and eventful seventy-year history, the NHS once again finds itself caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. This time, we’re talking about data. Health informatics has come of age over the last decade, with developments in Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and […]
The Future is Convalescence: Rethinking Recovery and the End of Covid–19
by Avril Tynan The progress and effectiveness of potential Covid–19 vaccines in the last few weeks have brought a new glimmer of hope to the closing months of 2020. While much of Europe remains under restrictions, or is tentatively emerging from a second lockdown, the new AstraZeneca-Oxford, BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are offering hope of […]