Blog by Taylor Riley Bristol, UK is a monument to the intertwining of histories of slavery and medicine. Smaller, literal monuments around the city tell its stories. There is the plinth that once held the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, which Black Lives Matter protestors toppled and drowned in the harbor in 2020. The […]
Tag: Blog
Turning Good Intentions into Good Outcomes: Ethical Dilemmas at a Student-Run Clinic and a Rubric for Reflective Action
Blog by Nicholas Peoples, Thomas Gebert and Dana L Clark Student-run clinics represent a unique medical education and healthcare delivery model powered largely by good intentions. These good intentions may produce questionable results, however, when juxtaposed with intense academic pressure for students to fill their curriculum vitae with personal achievements, leadership roles, and peer-reviewed publications. […]
Imagining New Humanities-Based Interventions to Address Caregiver Burden in Chronic Illness
Blog by Rita Dexter, MA As more and more medical schools incorporate medical humanities courses into their curriculum, their long-lasting impacts on the perspectives of our future physicians appear tangible.1 While we certainly need more empathetic and thoughtful physicians, medical humanities has the capacity to extend its reach beyond medical school education to help the […]
The Doctor Will Not See You Now
Blog by Drew Remignanti, MD, MPH “The boundaries between health and disease, between well and sick, are far from clear and never will be clear, for they are diffused by cultural, social, and psychological considerations.” So wrote Dr. George L. Engel in 1977, when he proposed his biopsychosocial model of illness. The bolding of never […]
The Story Behind Kaleidoscopic Minds: An Anthology of Poetry by Neurodivergent Women
Blog by Dr. Catherine Bell, GP and coeditor of Kaleidoscopic Minds Kaleidoscopic Minds is an anthology of poetry written by neurodivergent women. The poets featured in this collection belong to a generation of late-diagnosed, undiagnosed and misdiagnosed women with lived experience of ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, OCD, and tics. The editors believe that poetry is […]
Stories of the Futures You Didn’t See Coming: Scenario Planning, Healthcare, and the Humanities
Blog by Matt Finch Though it’s just a trick of the calendar, as the new year begins our thoughts inevitably turn to the future. Yet we cannot gather data from events that haven’t happened yet, and forecasts drawing on precedent can flounder when situations are unstable. Under so-called “TUNA” conditions of turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and […]
You Are Special: The Global Importance of Identifying the Needs of Patients with Metastatic Breast Cancer
Blog by Hilde M. Buiting, Ikenna D. Ebuenyi, Phyllis N. Butow and Gabe S. Sonke Ninety-Two Participants from Twenty-Seven Countries in One Meeting In November 2019, ninety-two healthcare professionals, patients and patient advocates from twenty-seven countries from all over the world attended a multidisciplinary workshop to discuss gaps in care and support for patients with […]
The Medicalisation of Exhaustion: Kruschen Salts in Early Twentieth-Century Southern Africa
Article Summary by Perseverence Madhuku How did exhaustion in British colonies become a medical problem to be fixed, remedied, and eradicated? In the first half of the twentieth century, Kruschen salts, a laxative and diuretic tonic, circulated in Britain and its colonies. It was advertised as a cure for a range of diseases and […]
Will AI Hasten a Dystopian Healthcare Landscape?
Reflection by Dr. Thanemozhi G. Natarajan PhD and Dr. Natarajan Ganesan PhD In the movie Idiocracy (2006), a cryogenically frozen man named Joe wakes up in a distant future where the world has become a dystopian wasteland. One of the most striking scenes in the movie occurs when Joe goes to the doctor for a […]
Ethnology, Part II: In Close Contact with Thoughts and Things
Blog by Susanne Lundin In this second part of a two-part series on the role of ethnology as a humanistic discipline, we look closely at ethnological methods. We saw in part one how a nineteenth-century pregnant farmer’s wife in a Swedish parish placed an axe under her marital bed, hoping to influence the sex of […]