Reflection by Michiel Meeusen Michiel Meeusen received his PhD in Literature from KU Leuven in 2013. He specialises in ancient science and medicine and the literature and culture of the High Roman Empire (Orcid). Western literature starts with a disease. At the beginning of the Iliad, Homer sings of an “evil pestilence” sent by […]
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Unintended Impacts of COVID-19 Social Distancing
Blog by Dr. Thurka Sangaramoorthy Thurka Sangaramoorthy is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and an expert on issues of infectious disease outbreaks, health equity, and social justice. She is the author of Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Rutgers University, 2014) and Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A […]
Bodies, Environments, and the Spread of Disease
Editor Brandy Schillace interviews Annamaria Carusi, PhD. Dr. Annamaria Carusi, previously faculty in medical humanities, left academe to work as a private consultant on the social dimensions of science and innovation, especially focusing on how to build bridges between biomedicine and public health policy. In today’s podcast, Dr. Carusi discusses the way humans and environments […]
Medfest 2020
Announcement by Kirpal Sadheura, CT2 Psychiatry and MedFest 2020 Lead MedFest is an international medical film festival aiming to investigate and explore themes in medicine through the medium of film. It has been running for over 10 years, as an annual event, screening at Universities in the UK and around the world from April 2020. […]
Social Distancing and Loneliness: Community and ‘Oneliness’ in the Age of Coronavirus
Blog by Dr Fay Bound Alberti, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Reader in History at the University of York and author of A Biography of Loneliness: the history of an emotion (Oxford University Press, 2019). Like loneliness, Coronavirus has become a global pandemic, and with the introduction of social distancing, these two threats are being conflated. […]
Corporate Medical Cultures: MD Anderson as a Case Study in American Corporate Medical Values
Article Summary by Dr. John Mulligan Using MD Anderson Cancer Center as a case study in nonprofit corporate medicine, this paper historicizes certain artificial constraints on debates over the role of healthcare corporations in American medicine, explores the consequences of these constraints, and suggests some ways of thinking about how we might begin to unwind […]
Is It Medicine, Is it Religion, or Is It Both? An Interview with Comic Book Writer Al Ewing
Interview by A. David Lewis In this discussion with award-winning comic book author Al Ewing, comics theorist and graphic medicine researcher A. David Lewis explores the growing idea that the comics medium may be drawing medicine and religion—bodily health and spiritual affairs—more closely towards each other via its superhero titles. From Ewing’s revolutionary work on […]
Beyond Messiaen’s Birds: The Post-Verbal World of Dementia
Article Summary by Dr. Stuart Wood Beyond Messiaen’s Birds was inspired by a realisation I had during an arts-based research workshop. The discussion was around how music therapists or other music practitioners make connections with people who are living with dementia. As I tried to put into words how we try to find music for […]
Estranged Relations: Coercion and Care in Narratives of Supported Decision-Making in Mental Healthcare
Article summary by Meredith Stone When you ask people about their experiences of coercion in 21st century mental healthcare do they speak of locked wards, seclusion, electroshock, and chemical restraint? Not always. In this article we report on a study in which we asked people who had experienced mental healthcare, either as a service user […]
Laila Eloui, Iconic Egyptian Actress, Reflects on Womanhood, Film and Social Responsibility
Interview by Dr Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent Laila Eloui has earned her iconic status and popularity in the Egyptian and Arab film industry as one of the most versatile actresses of her generation. Having started as a child performer in radio programs at the age of 7 years, she made a successful transition […]