David Clark, Cicely Saunders: A Life and Legacy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 335pp., £25.99 hardcover, ISBN: 9780190637934 Reviewed by Joe Wood, University of Glasgow This biography, almost 20 years in gestation, provides an encyclopaedic account of the life of Cicely Saunders, often described as the founder of the modern hospice movement. The book […]
Latest articles
Opioids and pain in the emergency department: a narrative crisis
The commentary by Jay Baruch and Stacey Springs, ‘Opioids and pain in the emergency department: a narrative crisis’, is available through open access in the current issue of Medical Humanities. A young woman presents to the emergency department in a sickle cell crisis, complaining of unbearable pain. When asked to rate it on a scale of […]
September 44.3
We are pleased to present the September issue, with its breadth of interest and multiple foci—and also a commentary on our June issue (Pain and its Paradoxes) as yet another way of continuing the conversation. Over the coming month, summaries of these articles will appear here on the blog, along with soundbites from authors explaining […]
Encouraging Patient Narrative as a Humanitarian Act of Kindness
This blog post comes from Catherine Kelsey, a nursing lecturer at the University of Bradford. The ability to tell our stories is as crucial to human life as the air we breathe, the food we eat and the functioning of our senses (Robertson and Clegg, 2017). The communicating of stories can help us to create […]
Dear X: A Letter to Chronic Fatigue
Today’s blog post comes from Louise Kenward. Her background is as an artist, currently writing, with a career in the NHS as a psychologist and psychotherapist specialising in Cognitive Analytic Therapy (as a therapist and a supervisor) in East Sussex. She is seeking to find ways of drawing on all of these aspects of her […]
Book Review: The Reading Cure
The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite by Laura Freeman, London: W&N, 2018. Reviewed by Sarah Ahmed, King’s College London Almost ten years after being diagnosed with anorexia, after a decade of eating because she had to, not because she wanted to, Freeman found herself reading Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. His […]
Deafhearing Family Life in The Silent Child: an Unsympathetic Portrayal?
The Silent Child, C. Overton and R. Shenton, 2017. UK: Slick films Reviewed by Dr Sara Louise Wheeler, Lecturer in Social Policy, Bangor University At the 2018 Oscars, writer and actor Rachel Shenton made her acceptance speech in British Sign Language (BSL), when her film, The Silent Child, won the Oscar for best live action […]
Book Review: Phenomenology of Illness
Phenomenology of Illness by Havi Carel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016 Reviewed by James Rakoczi Havi Carel’s Phenomenology of Illness is a rich and tightly-structured book with two principle aims. First, ‘to provide a comprehensive and coherent phenomenology of illness’ (38). Second, to travel in the ‘opposite direction’ and give an account of ‘what illness […]
Humanitarian Evidence Week (HEW), 19th-25th November 2018
Humanitarian Evidence Week (HEW) is a week of both virtual and online events co-ordinated by the UK charity, Evidence Aid, which since 2004 has championed evidence-based approaches to humanitarian action. Additional support for HEW 2018 is provided by the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine (CEBM) at the University of Oxford. This annual event takes place in […]
Medicine the Musical
This blog post comes from Michael Ehrenreich, a physician who has also written the music and lyrics for Medicine the Musical, a new play about medical school to be staged off Broadway in November. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,’ wrote English poet John […]