by Tina Catherine Sideris This paper tells the story of one man’s experience of terrifying hallucinations and nightmares in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). His experience draws attention to the reality that intensive care treatment can cause emotional suffering severe enough to be identified as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At the same time this patient’s […]
Latest articles
United in Film: Psychiatrist Dr Nabil Elkot Recommends Drama Therapy for Patients and Doctors
Dr Nabil Elkot is a senior Egyptian consultant psychiatrist and the head of the addiction unit in El-Rakhawi Hospital in Cairo. He has a special interest in group therapy for managing addiction and dependency. He was involved in in co-writing, supervising and acting in three landmark TV series: ‘Under control’, ‘Free fall’, and ‘Above suspicion,’ […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]