Article Summary by Veronica Neefjes When we use war metaphors we think of a particular situation as a fight. War metaphors are widely used to spur people into action; ‘fight climate change’ and ‘war on drugs’ are just two examples. In healthcare war metaphors have a poor reputation because many fear that thinking of especially […]
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Performing HeLa: Theatrical Bodies and Living Remains
Article Summary by Emma Cox My work considers the role theatre and performance play in making sense of diverse healthcare experiences, medical histories, and biomedical technologies. My essay in this issue of Medical Humanities is concerned with how theatre, as an embodied artform, can make meaning out of the complicated, traumatic histories that have built up […]
Of Dogs and Men (and Aging)
Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York Review of The Truffle Hunters (directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, Italy, 2020), available from Amazon Prime The Truffle Hunters is a subtle, cinematically beautiful documentary, drawn from the personal stories of a group of aging Italian truffle hunters. Taken together, these stories celebrate […]
Will AI Hasten a Dystopian Healthcare Landscape?
Reflection by Dr. Thanemozhi G. Natarajan PhD and Dr. Natarajan Ganesan PhD In the movie Idiocracy (2006), a cryogenically frozen man named Joe wakes up in a distant future where the world has become a dystopian wasteland. One of the most striking scenes in the movie occurs when Joe goes to the doctor for a […]
Justice for Indigenous People
Film Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent Wednesday 9th August 2023 marks the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People celebrated by the United Nations (UN). The day commemorates the first meeting of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations held in Geneva in 1982. According to UN statistics, there is an estimated […]
Ethnology, Part II: In Close Contact with Thoughts and Things
Blog by Susanne Lundin In this second part of a two-part series on the role of ethnology as a humanistic discipline, we look closely at ethnological methods. We saw in part one how a nineteenth-century pregnant farmer’s wife in a Swedish parish placed an axe under her marital bed, hoping to influence the sex of […]
Conference Announcement: Medicine and The Arts Symposium, Barcelona, 19th-21st October 2023
Announcement by Jonathan McFarland, President of The Doctor as a Humanist Medicine and healthcare seem to be at a crossroads; some may say, reinterpreting Shakespeare that there is something rotten in the state medical education, and thus in healthcare, in general. And certainly, since the pandemic, whose vestiges are still being seen around the world, […]
Podcast with Stuart Murray and David Tabron
Podcast with Stuart Murray and David Tabron In this episode, Brandy speaks to Stuart Murray and David Tabron. David works for Blueberry Academy, a business that operates in special educational needs. “We’re a training provider, a post-16 training provider. And we also operate in health and social care,” David explains. Blueberry Academy was set up […]
June 2023 Special Issue: Talking About Sex and Reproduction: Counselling in Postwar Europe
Talking about Sexual and Reproductive Health: Counselling Encounters in Postwar Europe Jenny Bangham, Yuliya Hilevych, Caroline Rusterholz “If We Can Show That We Are Helping Adolescents to Understand Themselves, Their Feelings and Their Needs, Then We Are Doing [a] Valuable Job”: Counselling Young People on Sexual Health in the Brook Advisory Centre (1965–1985) Caroline Rusterholz […]
Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers
Book Review by Kristie Serota At ninety-nine short pages, Shiloh Krupar’s new book Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers (2023) is an epistemological heavyweight. This small book, one in a series of thought-in-process scholarship from the University of Minnesota Press, is light to hold and heavy to read. Krupar explores the geographical foundations of […]