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 […]
Latest articles
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; […]
Book Review: The Development of Narrative Practices in Medicine c.1960-2000
The Development of Narrative Practices in Medicine c.1960-2000 Jones E M, Tansey E M. (eds) (2015) Wellcome Witnesses to Contemporary Medicine, vol. 52. London: Queen Mary University of London. Reviewed by Ben Chisnall, Medical Student, King’s College London, UK “Narrative medicine” is a term used to refer to a number of analytical and interpretative […]
Medicine Unboxed: Students 2015 – An Invitation to Participate
Medicine Unboxed: Students 2015 – Call for Participation Medicine Unboxed aims to inspire debate and cultural change in healthcare. Medicine today exists at a time of extraordinary scientific knowledge and therapeutic possibility but faces challenging moral, political and social questions. Medicine Unboxed engages the general public and healthcare audiences with a view of medicine […]
ePatients: The Medical, Ethical and Legal Repercussions of Blogging and Micro-Blogging Experiences of Illness and Disease – Call for Papers and Conference Details
Queen’s University Belfast, 11-12 September 2015 Call for Papers Referring to the growth of online patient-initiated resources, including medical blogs, the BMJ noted in a 2004 editorial that we were witnessing ‘the most important technocultural medical revolution of the past century’. Ten years later, the controversy caused by Bill Keller’s opinion piece in the New […]
Art in Arthritis by Nancy Merridew
I called Marco from the waiting room. Everyone looked waxen under the fluorescent lights of Rheumatology Clinic. His olive skin looked grey. He rose like a grapevine on the trellis – thickset but gnarled through the seasons. Marco helped his wife with her handbag and they walked together. Her gait was […]
The Reading Room: The Wellcome Book Prize
The shortlist for the Wellcome Book Prize was announced today (http://wellcomebookprize.org/) Awarded annually, and open to works of fiction and nonfiction, the prize focuses on books that have some aspect of medicine, illness or health as their central theme. This year’s shortlist includes the following six titles: The Iceberg by Marion Coutts Do No […]