Blog by Jessica Hammett, University of Bristol, jessica.hammett@bristol.ac.uk What’s the relationship between the humanities and public health—rather than medicine? Public health typically focuses on populations rather than individuals, and on the prevention of illness and promotion of health and wellbeing. Sometimes seen as a ‘poor relation’ to biomedicine, it has enjoyed new prominence and recognition […]
Latest articles
Humanising Care for Older People Living with Dementia: Teun Toebes in conversation with Khalid Ali
Podcast with Tuen Toebes In this podcast Teun Toebes reflects on how, as a 21-year old nursing student, he wanted to know more about the life of older people living with dementia in a care home in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Moving in as one of the housemate in a care home, and not as […]
“Pennies from Heaven”: Resilience in the Time of Covid
‘Back Home’ (Sara Shazli, Egypt, 2021) Film Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Emeritus Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York As with all good art, the film Back Home can offer rewards from more than one perspective, but to this viewer the film is chiefly the portrait of a resilient older man who employs self-deprecating […]
An Interdisciplinary Alliance that Matters: Medical Humanities
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 […]
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 […]