Review of Mystic River, USA 2003, directed by Clint Eastwood. Review by Franco Ferrarini, gastroenterologist and film reviewer. Review contains plot spoilers. Based on the eponymous 2001 novel by Dennis Lehane, “Mystic River” is one of the darkest and probably best of Clint Eastwood movies. The story might be well known to those who read […]
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The Immigrants’ Case of Shakespeare: A Discussion About Borders and Health Effects of Separation
In the only surviving script to contain his handwriting, William Shakespeare composed an extraordinary speech for the The Book of Sir Thomas More in which More defends immigrants against an angry mob. Over 400 years later, the United States federal government was shut down for weeks over the issue of whether to construct a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. In this podcast, public […]
Want Trust in Science? Think Common Sense
by Austin Lam, medical student at the University of Toronto Want Trust in Science? Think Common Sense. Trust in science is not a new topic. Yet it remains an important area of discussion, with potentially serious consequences for public health, particularly with vaccinations. The larger underlying issue here is the idea of science that people […]
The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science and the Great War
Stefanous Geroulanos and Todd Meyers (writers). The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science and the Great War (2018), University of Chicago Press, 432 pp, £26.50. by Linda Roland Danil In this book, Geroulanos and Meyers mainly explore the emergence of a new approach towards corporeal integration in physiology during and after […]
The 2nd The Doctor as a Humanist Symposium
Jonathan McFarland (Sechenov University) and Irina Markovina (Sechenov University). In October 2017 the 1st The Doctor as a Humanist symposium took place in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. At the symposium we posed the questions, “Can the Humanities transform 21st Century Medicine?” The end of the first symposium in Spain was closed with the words, “Thanks […]
Living Archives and Dying Wards: Reflections on Medical Archives in Eastern Africa
by Dr. Mika Marissa I am currently writing a book on the history of the Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI). I tell the story of how a small experimental chemotherapy research site established by the Makerere department of surgery and the US National Cancer Institute in 1967 remained open during a long period of political instability, […]
Flash Mob in Medical Education – What Can Go Wrong? And is it Wrong?
Blog by Dr. Aneesh Basheer and Dr. Magi Murugan A flash mob refers to a group of individuals who gather at a common place to create awareness or sensitize an audience to some topic usually with no prior information to the latter. Flash mobs have become common in several fields including social awareness programs, business, […]
Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction [book review]
Anne Whitehead, Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) 224 pages, £75.00 ISBN 9780748686186 (Paperback forthcoming in May 2019). by Marie Allitt. In order to unravel the concept of empathy, Anne Whitehead engages with many of the increasingly relevant and problematic topics in both medicine and medical humanities today, […]
Soaring but Souring Sugar: Type 2 Diabetes in Kerala
In this post, Professor Kesavan Rajasekharan Nayar discusses complexity with respect to the public health profile of Kerala, considered as one of the healthiest states in India. This complexity is indeed worrisome and a humanitarian perspective which addresses the psychological and economic fallouts of the health scenario is required. Societies which have been proclaimed as […]
Biomedicine and the Humanities: Growing Pains
In this article for December’s Special Issue, Hume, Mulemi, and Sadok take a look at the unique challenges facing humanities researchers in clinical and community health settings in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. Their work considers these experiences within the broader context—but our broader context of disciplinary ’ethnocentrism’ that hampers the development of knowledge in […]