Podcast Interview with Alice Wong Alice Wong is a disabled activist, media maker, and consultant. She is the Founder and Director of the Disability Visibility Project® (DVP), an online community dedicated to creating, sharing and amplifying disability media and culture created in 2014. Alice is also a co-partner in four projects: DisabledWriters.com, a resource to […]
Latest articles
The Impact of Communication on Access to Genetic Testing for Limited English Proficient Populations
The last time my grandmother returned from the doctor’s office, she handed me a pamphlet that explained her condition and the different procedures she could undergo. Then she asked me what she should do. As an immigrant from Nicaragua, her preferred language is Spanish. Even though she knows basic English, it’s difficult for her to […]
Medicus: The Power of Knowledge—A Novel Approach to Medical History
Exhibition Review by Prof Desmond O’Neill, MD, FRCPI The closing of an innovative exhibition of medical history in the ancient German city of Speyer may seem to be a small loss in the context of the many enormous tragic losses of life and livelihood of Covid-19. However, medical history has insights to offer on how […]
Death in Isolation: The Covid-19 Dead Are More Than Numbers
Blog by Avril Tynan We are in the midst of a pandemic for which we are woefully unprepared. Our priorities now, quite rightly, are to minimize the losses—both personal and ultimately economic. Our anticipative strategies for prevention have become plans for mitigation and—hopefully, one day—recovery. We are growing accustomed, in a terrifying—and, for most generations, […]
Things and Trends: Images of COVID-19
Blog by Annamaria Carusi Images of COVID19 are powerful in their own right and subtly or not so subtly inform how we relate to this pandemic. There are, of course, many COVID19 images, which will no doubt yield rich analyses in good time. I offer here just a quick impression of two kinds of images […]
“Make COVID-19 Visuals Gross”
Provocation by Kristin Marie Bivens and Marie Moeller The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) medical illustration that represents the novel coronavirus has become the emblem of COVID-19 and the pandemic. In a recent reverse image search, the image returned 5,260,000,000 results in 1.84 seconds. These numbers—over five billion—suggest that the CDC’s image of […]
Better Access for the Disabled–Insights from the COVID 19 Pandemic
Blog by Aneesh Basheer Much of the response to the COVID 19 pandemic from governments, health authorities and volunteer organizations has neglected people with disabilities. While this is generally true during concerted response to any sort of disasters, the current COVID 19 situation offers particular insights into the intrinsic ableism of our society while also […]
Homelessness in a Time of Social Distancing
Blog by Joshua Mizels, Lauren Holt, and Madeline Hooper In all honesty, social distancing hasn’t been too tough for us medical students. Sure, it’s been frustrating to sit on the sidelines while our various medical colleagues are on the front lines fighting this COVID-19 pandemic; after all, this is what we signed up for. But […]
Medical Necessity, from the Every Day to Times of Crisis
Reflection by Daniel Skinner When I set out to write Medical Necessity: Health Care and the Politics of Decision Making, I had no idea that it would be published right as a pandemic was beginning to make its way around the world. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but my persistent thought over the past few […]
Access to Healthcare
Blog by Dr Rossella Pulvirenti and Dr Angelika Reichstein Last winter, the pages of British newspapers reported the story of Nasar Ullah Khan, a 38 Pakistani citizen, who had been living in Birmingham for the past 9 years overstaying his visa, which expired in 2011.[1] In August 2018, since he was struggling with some heart […]