Blog by Dr Rossella Pulvirenti and Dr Angelika Reichstein Last winter, the pages of British newspapers reported the story of Nasar Ullah Khan, a 38 Pakistani citizen, who had been living in Birmingham for the past 9 years overstaying his visa, which expired in 2011.[1] In August 2018, since he was struggling with some heart […]
Tag: Blog
Naming and Shaming: Covid-19 and the Medical Professional
Blog by Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose On Saturday the 7th of March, Australia’s state of Victoria’s health minister Jenny Mikakos declared that she was “flabbergasted” that a Melbourne GP had continued to see patients while he had “flu-like symptoms”. The doctor in question, Dr Chris Higgins, had returned from a trip to the US […]
Classics in Time of Pandemic: Lockdown Reflections from the Ivory Tower
Reflection by Michiel Meeusen Michiel Meeusen received his PhD in Literature from KU Leuven in 2013. He specialises in ancient science and medicine and the literature and culture of the High Roman Empire (Orcid). Western literature starts with a disease. At the beginning of the Iliad, Homer sings of an “evil pestilence” sent by […]
Unintended Impacts of COVID-19 Social Distancing
Blog by Dr. Thurka Sangaramoorthy Thurka Sangaramoorthy is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and an expert on issues of infectious disease outbreaks, health equity, and social justice. She is the author of Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Rutgers University, 2014) and Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A […]
Social Distancing and Loneliness: Community and ‘Oneliness’ in the Age of Coronavirus
Blog by Dr Fay Bound Alberti, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Reader in History at the University of York and author of A Biography of Loneliness: the history of an emotion (Oxford University Press, 2019). Like loneliness, Coronavirus has become a global pandemic, and with the introduction of social distancing, these two threats are being conflated. […]
Ectogenesis at Home? Artificial Wombs and Access to Care
Blog by Claire Horn In our accessibility series, Claire Horn reflects on the moral dilemmas presented by the advent of a new reproductive technology that allows for gestation outside the womb. —Cristina Hanganu-Bresch The last several years have seen significant progress toward the development of an artificial womb which would facilitate the survival […]
Language as a Gate to Medical Services: Medical Interpreting in the NHS
Blog by Dr. Teodora Manea This year, our journal’s theme is access to healthcare. In that spirit, Dr. Manea reflects on the role of medical interpreters as vital players in the process of accessing medical care in the NHS —Cristina Hanganu-Bresch In the past few decades, the number of non-English speaking patients who access […]
Talking Past Dementia: TimeSlips and the Creative Aging Revolution
Video and Blog by David Ney When I was ten years old, my mom and I went to see the doctor because my grandfather was sick. He had been there for me when I was sick as a kid, and I wanted to be there for him now. Pop sat on the exam table crinkling […]
Seeking Blog Content On This Year’s Theme: Access
Announcement by Cristina Hanganu-Bresch This year’s theme for Medical Humanities-BMJ is access to health care: how does accessibility as a facet of social justice impact how people manage and make sense of their health? Access to medical services can mean many things—from insurance coverage, to social services that make medical care possible, to outright discrimination for disadvantaged […]
Minding the Gap: One Institution’s Strategy for Infusing Health Humanities into Multiple Academic Programs across a Graduate Health Science University
Part Two of a Two-Part Blog Series by Lisa Kerr, PhD; Dusti Annan-Coultas, EdD; Jane Ariail, PhD; Jennifer Bailey, MEd; Caroline DeLongchamps; Cindy Dodds, PT, PhD, PCS; Brooke Fox, MS, CA; Jeanne G. Hill, MD; Kimberly Kascak, MEd; Steve Kubalak, PhD; Michael Madson, PhD; Ben Reynolds, PhD; Bob Sade, MD; Tabitha Samuel, MLIS; Thomas G. […]