In an article for our June special issue “Pain and its Paradoxes”, “Pain as Performance: Re-Virginisation in Turkey,” Hande Güzel turns to an analysis of acute pain related to re-virginisation, a surgical process of hymenoplasty that women in Turkey undertake to satisfy social expectations regarding virginity upon marriage. These expectations lead to the performance of what […]
Latest articles
Adaptive Frameworks of Chronic Pain: Daily Remakings of Pain and Care at a Somali Refugee Women’s Health Centre
In her article from our June special issue, “Pain and its Paradoxes”, Kari Campeau investigates how Somali women living in the US understand their experience of chronic pain, its treatment and their strategies for coping with that pain in her study, “Adaptive Frameworks of Chronic Pain: Daily Remakings of Pain and Care at a Somali […]
Shifting Understandings of Labour Pain in Canadian Medical History
Here we continue showcasing articles from our June special issue on “Pain and its Paradoxes”. Beginning with the observation that the pain associated with childbirth is a universal biological reality, Whitney Wood, in her article “Shifting Understandings of Labour Pain in Canadian Medical History,” explores how such pain is nevertheless understood in different ways by […]
Before Narrative: Episodic Reading and Representations of Chronic Pain
In “Before Narrative: Episodic Reading and Representations of Chronic Pain,” an article in our June special issue on “Pain and its Paradoxes”, Sara Wasson counterpoises fragmentary, incomplete and episodic forms of writing to teleogenetic narratives that make the experience of chronic pain coherent and, in doing so, risk marginalising the voices of those whose experience does […]
June Special Issues: Pain and its Paradoxes
We are pleased to announce the June Special Issue of BMJ Medical Humanities on “Pain and its Paradoxes,” guest edited by Daniel Goldberg, PhD, Faculty at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado. This incredibly diverse issue looks carefully at the concept of pain cross-culturally and from a variety of disciplinary lenses. MH […]
‘Your Love Protects Me’: The Pleasures and Perils of Caregiving
América, directed by Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside, USA 2018 Showing on Saturday and Sunday 9th and 10th June at Sheffield Doc Fest, Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York Toward the end of the arresting film, América, a tour de force that depicts nearly […]
Wings
Today’s guest blog post comes from Rebecca Marshall who has just graduated from UCL Medical School having intercalated in Global Health. She is currently undertaking an MSc in Medical Anthropology (also at UCL). Her main interests include the intersections between medical anthropology, global health and bioethics. Here she writes about Wings, a recent play showing a […]
Book Review: Disability and the Welfare State in Britain
Jameel Hampton, Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy, 1948-1979 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016), 277 pp., $ 110.00 cloth, ISBN: 9781447316428. Reviewed by Sasha Mullally, University of New Brunswick From 1948 to 1979, British society might have been on a ‘collective train’ into an egalitarian social democratic future, but, as […]
Eat, Drink, Be NOT Merry and Die Too: Public Health Implications of Alcohol Consumption
In this blog post, Kesavan Rajasekharan Nayar and his colleagues discuss the public health implications of excessive alcohol consumption on the people of Kerala, India. Alcoholism has a major share in the morbidity profile of the Kerala society; apart from serious emotional, familial and economic crises, it also leads to higher rates of suicides. This is […]
White Coats Need Color
This week’s blog post comes from Caroline Christianson, a second year medical student at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA. ‘Write down something about yourself that has to be put on hold while you train in medicine.’ During what had so far been a passive group exercise, this prompt […]