Anna M. Elsner and Monika Pietrzak-Franger, eds., Literature and Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2024. ISBN-13 978-1009300070). Book Review by Burcu Alkan Medical humanities has gained extensive attention in the past decade and is now an institutionally established interdisciplinary field. Yet, historically speaking, literature and medicine were not quite so separate in the first place. As […]
Latest articles
March 2024 Issue
Creating comics, songs and poems to make sense of decolonising the curriculum: a collaborative autoethnography patchwork [read the article summary] Muna Al-Jawad, Gaurish Chawla, Neil Singh “And Then It Spreads”: contagion and disease as metaphors of sociomoral contamination in Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole [read the article summary] Arindam Nandi, Avishek Parui They are […]
Post-Pandemic Futures: December 2025 Special Issue of BMJ Medical Humanities
Guest Editors Loic Bourdeau and Steven Wilson The immediate response to Covid-19 brought together political actors, health professionals, educators, industry leaders, artists, and activists. Yet the pandemic more generally has thrown into sharp relief the importance of connections in making sense of, and reacting to, health crises – connections between countries and peoples; between epidemiology […]
Invisible Disabilities Should Not Mean Invisible Patients
Blog by Rebecca Zickerman When doctors fail to communicate effectively with their patients, quality of care is impacted; on the patient side, communication barriers such as language, health literacy, and disabilities interfering with information processing may all contribute to detrimental health effects. Health-care providers need more training on how to communicate effectively with patients […]
Acting My Age
Blog by Tina Chai When asked my age, I almost always want to say sixteen before stopping myself to say twenty-four. I don’t feel twenty-four. At most, I’m twenty-three and three-fourths—oscillating between who I was and who I want to become, but not feeling quite there or quite good enough. Sometimes, I say something […]
Making Modern Maternity
Eds. Whitney Wood, Heather Love, Jerika Sanderson, and Karen Weingarten From the early 1800s through the twenty-first century, pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal experiences have been constructed as “modern”—or alternatively positioned as traditional, antiquated, or somewhere in between—at multiple sites and across multiple forms of media, including expert advice, advertisements, popular magazines and newspapers, fiction, television, […]
Does Disgust Protect Us from Pathogens?
Blog by Philippa Nicole Barr We have all heard the provocative discussions about turning protein-rich insects into a viable, global food source for humans and animals.1 Yet the idea of eating them generates disgust or approval, depending on where in the world they are being served. What does this variable response imply for theories that […]
Deconstructing Taboos of Surrogacy and Backstreet Abortion in the Arab World
Review of ‘A Tie of a Womb’ (Selat Rahem)’ TV series, directed by Tamer Nady, Egypt, 2024, available on Shahid MBC in Arabic with English subtitles Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent. Surrogate pregnancy, backstreet abortion, doctor/patient romantic relationships, and doctors’ addiction are sensitive issues everywhere, but particularly so in the Arab world. […]
Conceptual Anatomy of the Female Genitalia Using Text Mining and Implications for Patient Care
Article Summary by Carmen Thong and Alexis Doyle Using the word ‘vagina’ to describe the vulva would be the same as using the word ‘throat’ to describe the mouth; yet, the word ‘vagina’ is commonly used to name the vulva or the whole genitalia whilst the word ‘vulva’ is hardly ever used. Our article analyzes […]
Too Good for this World: Moral Bioenhancement and the Ethics of Making Moral Misfits
Article Summary by Katherine Ward Moral bioenhancement is the use of biomedical technologies to alter the moral characteristics of people; it’s the attempt to make people more moral through medical intervention. Some philosophers argue that we have a duty to morally enhance ourselves. We recently struggled to cooperate during a pandemic—to shift our behavior to […]