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 […]
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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 […]
Naming and Shaming: Covid-19 and the Medical Professional
Blog by Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose On Saturday the 7th of March, Australia’s state of Victoria’s health minister Jenny Mikakos declared that she was “flabbergasted” that a Melbourne GP had continued to see patients while he had “flu-like symptoms”. The doctor in question, Dr Chris Higgins, had returned from a trip to the US […]
Bandage, Sort and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering
Book Review by Christopher Bosley Josh Seim. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering. University of California Press, 2020. 272 pages. ISBN: 9780520300231 This book offers a stunning analysis of the Emergency Medical System (EMS), its frontline workers, and its patients. Seim concentrates on the ambulance as an […]
Classics in Time of Pandemic: Lockdown Reflections from the Ivory Tower
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 […]
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 […]