Lambert Wilson, actor and musician, Master of Ceremonies of Cannes Film Festival 2014, said “The world is written in an incomprehensible language, but cinema translates it for us universally. Without its guiding light, each person would remain in isolated darkness”. Exactly a year later in May 2015, an Italian film “Mediterranea” directed by Jonas […]
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Film Review: Alive Inside
It is because we live in a society where we tend to commit vulnerable members such as people with dementia to care institutions that we need documentaries like “Alive inside”. This very moving film, winner of the “Audience Award” at the Sundance Film Festival, 2014, follows a New York based social worker Dan Cohen as […]
The Reading Room: The Birkbeck Medical Humanities Reading Group
The Birkbeck Medical Humanities reading group aims to create a space in which academics, clinicians and students can come together to explore key readings, ideas and materials in the field of medical humanities. Our endeavour is to find ways of talking across the different disciplines of the humanities and medicine, and we welcome participation […]
The Reading Room: Upcoming workshop on ageing
Medical Humanities and Ageing, 29/06/2015 An initiative of the CHCI Medical Humanities Network Program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) Location: Old Committee Room, King’s Building, King’s College London, Strand Campus, Strand, London WC2R 2LSDate: Monday 29th June 2015 The Centre for the Humanities and Health, […]
The Reading Room: A review of ‘Health Humanities’
Health Humanities Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, Charley Baker, Victoria Tischler and Brian Abrams (London: Palgrave, 2015) Reviewed by Dr Maria Vaccarella, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Medical Humanities, Centre for the Humanities and Health, King’s College London In her foundational study Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (1999), Janet Lyon explains that “the manifesto both generates and […]
Mark Making: An Experience of Dementia and the Arts by Hannah Zeilig
Rose sensed that I was nervous. My façade of confidence was not convincing, I was holding my papers a little too defensively across my chest and my shoulders were tense. I stood awkwardly at the edge of the circle of people, feeling outside their camaraderie. It was strange but also salutary to feel an outsider […]
The Forgiveness Project: Stories for a Vengeful Age
Images of Eva Kor embracing former SS guard, Oskar Groening, at his trial in Lueneberg this week have been shared on social media and in newspapers worldwide. These images, and the responses to them, reveal much about the complex, surprising, inspiring and challenging, sometimes even threatening, nature of forgiveness. Our relationship with forgiveness, collective and […]
Film Review: Wild Tales
What separates us from living like animals? And what calamity or force does it take to unleash our primal instincts? “Wild Tales” is a compendium of satirical short stories about the pain and pressure points of modern 21st Century life and specifically what happens to the Latin spirit under duress. What delirious lengths do […]
Film Review: Still Alice
Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a good-looking fifty-year-old successful professor of linguistics; her loving husband (Alec Baldwin) is a brilliant research physician, she has three beautiful children, a brownstone in the Upper West side and a house at the Hamptons. This is the perfect stage for an impending disaster; in fact after some episodes of […]
Maslaha Workshop for Medical Students: Practical implications of working with diverse communities
Narrative is an increasingly potent concept for medical educators; developed as a tool to un-cover the patient experience as well as to illustrate the nuances where empathy has a place to fill the gap between the patient and their doctor. Medical humanities, then, has an integral role for students learning how to become a doctor; […]