Blog by D. Brendan Johnson Medicine is at home among crises. Hippocrates, or one of his disciples, in the Corpus Hippocraticum was one of the first to conceptualize a crisis as a medical reality, and it was a concept upon which Galen would build and thereby preserve for 1500 years. For these classical physicians, the […]
Tag: Blog
Apologies Alone Won’t Solve Structural Racism: We Need a Reckoning with the Racist Roots of U.S. Medicine
Response by Jacqueline Antonovich, Rana Hogarth, Elise Mitchell, Graham Mooney, Ayah Nuriddin, Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Kylie Smith, Christopher Willoughby and Alexandre White Recently, JAMA’s Clinical Reviews podcast recorded an episode with the Twitter headline: No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? The tweet is now deleted, and JAMA […]
Advocating for Survivors of Human Trafficking
Blog by Dipal Savla and Kanani Titchen “Erick” presented to the adolescent medicine clinic in San Diego, California for his routine wellness appointment. He was a new patient, so the doctor focused the appointment on getting to know him. Erick lived with a foster family. His mother, lacking access to necessary medical care, had recently […]
Doctors Who Torture: Medical Ethics at Crossroads
Blog by Steven H. Miles, MD The two-faced Roman god Janus is about transitions: from what came before to what now begins, from war to peace or from peace to war. It is easy to imagine the image of Janus atop the arch of this moment in the history of the medical profession. Here, it […]
Black History Month Feature: Margaret Morgan Lawrence
Blog by Cristina Hanganu-Bresch Today we honor Margaret Morgan Lawrence (1914-2019), a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, trailblazer pioneer in children’s community health. Lawrence had a storied career that was threatened at many turns by the intersection of racism and sexism. A graduate of Cornell in 1936 (when dorms were still segregated), she was denied entrance at […]
Black History Month Features: Mae Jemison
Feature1 by Brandy Schillace It’s true that doctors wear many hats. Mae Jemison also wore a space suit. In today’s feature, we honor Mae Jemison, an American engineer, physician, and NASA astronaut. Jemison attended Cornell Medical School, after receiving her degree in chemical engineering. During her years at Cornell, she worked at a Cambodian refugee […]
William Carlos Williams: Physician Poet Scrawls Theory of Medical Humanities Throughout Prescription Pad
Blog by Audrey Ruan “The use of poetry is to vivify,” William Carlos Williams jotted onto a prescription pad over half a century ago. In the pages that followed, he hastily sketched out a theory of the interwoven contributions of science and poetry, published here for the first time. The prescription book is part of […]
Waiting in Health and Medical Care: A Preliminary Exploration
Blog by K Rajasekharan Nayar; Anant Kumar; Muhammed Shaffi; Arathi P Rao; Anand Marthanda Pillai; S S Lal The notion of waiting is a deeply ingrained in human life both materially and spiritually, and has a philosophical connotation as well. In material terms, one can identify myriad ways in which waiting becomes important—waiting and hope […]
Access to Female Sterilization as Perceived by History of Medicine Students
Blog by Caitlin Fendley I teach a course on the history of disease, death, and medicine in twentieth-century America, which is predominantly taken by STEM and pre-med students and those seeking to work in healthcare. As part of teaching students about how culture and medicine influence each other, I devote lectures to women’s reproductive health […]
Body Positivity vs. Medical ‘Truths’: Obesity and the Cultural Production of Shame
Blog by Tanisha Jemma Rose Spratt In August 2019 US television host Bill Maher stated on national television that in order to tackle the US’s growing “obesity problem” fat-shaming needs to make a “come back”. Arguing for a greater emphasis on personal responsibility when it comes to food consumption and exercise, Maher claimed that “some […]