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 […]
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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 […]
Manifesto for a Visual Medical Humanities
By Dr Fiona Johnstone The medical humanities have recently taken a ‘visual turn’. Medical schools run modules aimed at increasing students’ visual literacy through exposure to artworks, and artists are engaged to teach ‘soft’ skills such as empathy. Art therapy is enjoying a renaissance, and the arts are celebrated for their ability to promote and […]
Global Health Humanities: A New Avenue For Medical Students
This blog post is from Mariam Ahmed and Farhiya Omar, both medical students at St George’s, University of London. Rewind a few years, to life before medical school. Our intentions for being doctors were first and foremost to benefit and help fellow humans in their times of most need by being compassionate souls and embracing […]
Pilgrims’ Progress: Need for a Humanitarian Mass-Gathering Policy
In this blog, Kesavan Rajasekharan Nayar and his colleagues discuss the need for an international, multi-dimensional mass-gathering policy, using the case study of a mass-gathering phenomenon for religious purposes in Kerala, India which draws about 45 million people annually. Mass-gathering in such huge numbers poses considerable challenges in terms of communicable and non-communicable disease surveillance, […]
CFP: Metaphoric Stammers and Embodied Speakers
Metaphoric Stammers and Embodied Speakers: Expanding the Borders of Dysfluency Studies, Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, 12 October, 2018. Extended deadline for submissions: 30 July 2018. Keynote speaker: Chris Eagle, Emory University, Centre for the Study of Human Health (Dysfluencies: On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature, 2014; Talking Normal: Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability, ed. […]