Iain Bamforth A Doctor’s Dictionary: Writings on Culture & Medicine 2015 Manchester: Carcanet ISBN: 978 1 784100 56 8 Reviewed by Professor Alan Bleakley Emeritus Professor of Medical Education and Medical Humanities Plymouth Peninsula School of Medicine, Plymouth University UK Iain Bamforth, by his own admission, is a writer who practices medicine. Indeed, while he appears […]
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The Reading Room: A review of ‘The Spanish Flu…’
The Spanish Flu: Narrative and Cultural Identity in Spain, 1918 Ryan A. Davis. Published by Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Hardcover, 255 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-33920-1 This book is unusual in that it deals with a subject that is scarcely found among international literature in the English language, the great influenza pandemic of 1918, or Spanish Flu, so-named […]
The Reading Room: A review of ‘Medical Humanities & Medical Education: How the Medical Humanities can Shape Better Doctors’
Medical Humanities & Medical Education: How the Medical Humanities can Shape Better Doctors by Alan Bleakley. Published by Routledge, 2015. Reviewed by Dr Claire Elliott How can medical education be changed to produce better, kinder medical students? How can they develop more astute clinical skills and improved awareness of the ethical and professional […]
Patients’, doctors’ and nurses’ stories at the London Film Festival (7-18 October 2015)
‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ Patients’, doctors’ and nurses’ stories at the London Film Festival (7-18 October 2015) October is the time of the year when the London Film Festival (LFF) http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff brings the best of British and World cinema to film lovers in London. Screening 238 fiction and documentary feature films, the […]
‘The Messenger’ directed by David Blair (2015)
The Messenger follows Jack (Robert Sheehan), the titular protagonist, who delivers messages from the ghosts of the recently-deceased to their bereaved loved ones. Only he can see those ghosts. Following the murder of a prominent war correspondent Mark (Alex Wyndham), Mark’s ghost tasks Jack with giving his wife an important message. Despite a premise that is […]
The Reading Room: A review of ‘Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us’
Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us by S. Lochlann Jain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Reviewed by Mary Anglin, Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky At the age of thirty-six, Lochlann Jain embarked on a journey for which neither her anthropological training nor her upbringing as “a reticent Canadian” and the daughter […]
Film Review: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”, USA 2015 Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon In UK cinemas now American cinema has always been fascinated by stories of cancer in young people; Love story, USA 1970, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Story_(1970_film), 50/50 (USA, 2011) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50/50_(2011_film), and more recently “The fault in our stars, USA 2014” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fault_in_Our_Stars_(film). The first feature film from […]
The Reading Room: The Lumen Journal – Call for Submissions
The Lumen is an annual Edinburgh University new writing and arts journal of the mutual dialogue between medicine, the arts and the humanities. We hope to foster creative and critical discourse on the personal experience of illness and healthcare. The Lumen will provide a space for the expression of the deeply personal narratives of the […]
The Reading Room: A review of James Rhodes’ ‘Instrumental’
Instrumental by James Rhodes Canongate Books, 2015. £16.99 hardcover, £14.99 E-Book Reviewed by Vivek Santayana, Postgraduate student in Literature and Modernity, The University of Edinburgh James Rhodes’s controversial memoir, Instrumental, is about many things. On the one hand, it is about the trauma of child rape. There is an ethical dimension to the […]
Film Review: The Maggie (1954) directed by Alexander Mackendrick
As part of the British Film Institute- BFI’s Britain on Film Project (www.bfi.org.uk/britain-on-film), the Maggie, (1954), one of the most endearing comedies made by Ealing Studios, has been digitized and re-released online and on DVD. […]