Anders Juhl Rasmussen interviews Dr Rishi Goyal, Director of Medicine, Literature and Society and Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Centre, and an attending physician in the Emergency Department at Columbia University. Goyal is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, and Rasmussen gives some observations from a recent teaching session […]
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Book Review – Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England
Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England by Olivia Weisser, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, 296 pages, £60. Reviewed by Sarah O’Dell, Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA 91702, sodell10@apu.edu In this well-researched and compelling work, Olivia Weisser addresses the relative paucity of scholarship on early modern gender and illness to argue […]
Romanticizing Tubercolosis
Our screening editor, Dr Khalid Ali (Khalid.ali@bsuh.nhs.uk), here writes about the importance of Romanian director Radu Jude’s new film Scarred Hearts (Romania, 2016) and interviews him at the London Film Festival in the podcast included below. Each year on the 24th of March, several organizations around the world celebrate ‘International Tuberculosis Day’. It serves as a […]
New Blog Curator and Reviews Editor
I am Anna McFarlane, the new blog curator and reviews editor here at the BMJ Medical Humanities blog, and I wanted to introduce myself to regular readers – and first time visitors. I’m delighted to be taking on this post and would like to thank my predecessor, Columba Quigley, who has been answering all my […]
Book Review: The Mystery of Being Human
Raymond Tallis, The Mystery of Being Human: God, Freedom and the NHS. Notting Hill Editions, 2016. Reviewed by Dr Sara Booth This collection of essays – lucid, varied, compelling – is by retired academic geriatrician and neuroscientist Professor Raymond Tallis. A man who may truly be called a polymath, he is not […]
Book Review – A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine
Corinna Wagner and Andy Brown (Eds.) A Body of Work. An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine. London, Bloomsbury, 2016, 532 pages Jack Coulehan, MD, Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA At first glance medicine and poetry seem like strange bedfellows. Yet, consider the fact that […]
Book Review: Illness as Many Narratives
Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture by Stella Bolaki. Published by Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Reviewed by Birgit Bunzel Linder Stella Bolaki’s Illness as Many Narratives introduces several instructive case studies that squarely fit into the critical mode of the second wave of the medical humanities. Drawing on diverse arts […]
London Human Rights Watch Film Festival
Film activism: London Human Rights Watch Film Festival- 6-17 March 2017, https://ff.hrw.org/london Introduction by Khalid Ali, Screening room editor Film events have recently become a platform for standing up against social injustice, and racism; the Oscar ceremony on Sunday 26th February was a powerful statement from film makers uniting against violation of human rights. […]
Book Review: The Snake in the Clinic
Guy Dargert, The Snake in the Clinic: Psychotherapy’s Role in Medicine and Healing. London: Karnac, 2016 Reviewed by Dr Jane Slater The best review of a book is unlikely to be written by an enthusiast, so I need to confess upfront that this book blew me away. The first time I read […]
The European Doctors Orchestra and the Irish Medical Choir
Professor Des O’Neill One of the pleasures of medicine is the frequent sense of a shared vision of how enmeshed it is with the humanities. As a group, doctors tend to have a high level of cultural engagement: for example, our own studies show that over 50% of medical students play, or have played an […]