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 […]
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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 […]
Reflections on Art, Voicelessness, and the Patient Experience
Emma Barnard MA (RCA) ‘Silence is not Golden’ ‘For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate, affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied’. Susan Sontag One […]
Film Review: It’s Only the End of the World
It’s only the end of the world, directed by Xavier Dolan, Canada, France 2016. In UK cinemas from 24th February 2017 Reviewed by Dr Franco Ferrarini Louis (Gaspard Ulliel) is a 34-year-old gay playwright who feels an urgent need to meet his family after 12 years of estrangement, to tell them about his terminal illness […]
Book Review: True Tales of Organisational Life
True Tales of Organisational Life Barbara-Anne Wren Karnac Books Ltd, 2016 ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-189-2 Reviewed by Dr Andrew Schuman It’s stories, the psychologist Barbara-Anne Wren reminds us, “that will hold us when nothing else can”. They are humankind’s most effective way of making sense of the world – of organising and giving “a […]
Book Review: This Way Madness Lies.
This Way Madness Lies. Madness and Beyond. By Mike Jay. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016. Reviewed by Dr Allan Beveridge Published to accompany the recent Wellcome Collection Exhibition, ‘Bedlam: the asylum and beyond’, this book is packed with over 600 photographs and illustrations drawn from the archives of institutions in Europe and America, […]
Editor-in-Chief post at Medical Humanities
The Institute of Medical Ethics and BMJ are looking for the next Editor-in-Chief who can continue to shape Medical Humanities into a dynamic resource for a rapidly evolving field. Candidates should be active in the field, keen to facilitate international perspectives and maintain an awareness of trends and hot topics. The successful candidate will […]