Lessons from Frankenstein: Narrative Myth as Ethical Model

by Yvette Koepke In the past year, scientific breakthroughs have shown both how relevant the questions raised by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein remain, and how commonly the novel gets used as a reference point in ethical debate. A YouTube comment on a news clip reporting the first successful cloning of monkeys in a Chinese lab insisted, […]

Read More…

Feet and Fertility in the Healing Temples: A Symbolic Communication System Between Gods and Men?

by Silvia Marinozzi Our contribution, Feet and Fertility in the healing temples: a symbolic communication system between gods and men?, aims at proposing a new interpretation of a traditional topic in the archaeological and historical medical studies. There are plenty of anatomical ex-votos of uteruses and feet found in temple repositories in Greece and Southern […]

Read More…

A Drive Through the Heart of Darkness

Review of ‘The Trial of Ratko Mladic’, directed by Henry Singer, and Robert Miller, showing in ‘London Human Rights Watch Film Festival’ 13–22 March 2019, https://ff.hrw.org/london by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York The Trial of Ratko Mladic begins on 22 November 2017 in The Hague, just as the world is anticipating a […]

Read More…

What Society Do We Live In? Doctor Gavin Francis on Precarity, Vulnerability, and Narrative

In today’s podcast, EIC Brandy Schillace interviews Gavin Frances, Scottish physician and writer of both travel and medical works of nonfiction. His books include True North, about the artic, Adventures in Human Being, a cultural map of the body, and Shapeshifters, looking at changes in our bodies over time (a Sunday Times Book of the […]

Read More…

Sensing Space and Making Place: The Hospital and Therapeutic Landscapes in Two Cancer Narratives

by Victoria Bates A Senior Lecturer in Modern History, Victoria Bates researches medico-legal history and the arts in medicine/healthcare at the University of Bristol. In this article for MH, she explores the role of “senses” in the construction and experience of “place,” principally by focusing on patients’ experiences of hospital care. By comparing two cancer narratives, […]

Read More…

Genetics, Molar Pregnancies, and Medieval Ideas of Monstrous Births: The Lump of Flesh in The King of Tars

by Natalie Goodison What’s fascinating about this paper is that it’s a collaboration between geneticists and medievalists—and this very rich perspective led me to rethink what the Middle Ages considered fact/fictitious. It begins with a fictional story, within which a woman gives birth to a lump of flesh. When I first read about this lump, […]

Read More…

The Poetry of Addiction: Review of ‘Wherever you are-Ovunque Proteggemi’, Directed by Bonifacio Angius, Italy 2018

Showing in ‘Cinema made in Italy 2019’ London Saturday 2nd March, https://www.british-italian.org/cinema-made-in-italy-2019/ Written by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine ‘Wherever You Are’ is a new Italian film that portrays addiction along with its usual weight of bleak antecedents and consequences, including dependency, conflict, depression and the collateral suffering of family members. But this alternately […]

Read More…

Let’s NOT Talk About Death: Review of ‘Euforia’, Directed by Valeria Golino, Italy 2018

Showing in ‘Cinema made in Italy 2019’, London, https://www.british-italian.org/cinema-made-in-italy-2019/. Review by Dr Khalid Ali, film and media correspondent ‘Euphoria’ is defined as ‘a feeling or state of intense excitement and happiness’. The word originates from the 17th century when it described well-being produced in a sick person by the use of drugs. In her second […]

Read More…

Material Medicine: Objects and Bodies– AMH Conference 2019

We are pleased to announce the CFP for the Association of Medical Humanities (UK) 2019 conference. CFP below; Read more here. Call for Papers We kindly encourage you to submit a proposal for presentation addressing one or more of the below-mentioned topics for the AMH Material Objects Conference 2019. The conference reflects on medical humanities practices […]

Read More…

Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory

Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara (Editors), Forward by Stacy Alaimo, 2017, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 667 pages, £58. Reviewed by Dr. Sue Smith Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory is a groundbreaking project dedicated to bringing […]

Read More…