Book Review by Swati Joshi Spencer, Danielle. Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pages: 369. ISBN 978-0-19-751076-6. Danielle Spencer’s Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity (2021) is the strong jet stream that shudders the “biopathological” (8) gaze compelling us to “locate the pathology—in ourselves” (xi). Her research […]
Tag: book review
The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Beth Blum. Columbia University Press. 2020. ISBN 9780231194921. During my teenage years, I was an avid reader of Stieg Larsson’s scandi noir trilogy Millennium, best known for its first title, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005). I loved the main character, Lisbeth Salander, and a few might be […]
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
Book Review By Matthew Harris Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the anatomy of injustice. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. ISBN: 9780374602512, 496 Pages. The central plea in Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s Inflamed is to have the reader acknowledge that colonial capitalism, which separates society from nature, subverts the holism required […]
Diagnosis: Truth and Tales
Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Jutel, Annemarie Goldstein. Diagnosis: Truth and Tales. University of Toronto Press, 2019. In a short verse from his posthumous collection Falling Ill (2016), American poet C. K. Williams offered a richly ambiguous representation of his experience receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. The poem, “Diagnosis,” begins with a coherent reflection on […]
Lumen
Book review by Laura Grace Simpkins Tiffany Atkinson. Bloodaxe Books, 2021. ISBN 978-1-78037-530-4. Morphine, ‘magnolias of paperwork’, and hammocks: these are a few of the things touched on by Tiffany Atkinson in her fourth collection of poems, Lumen. The publication is divided into two parts: a sequence followed by standalones—including many that star Otto, Atkinson’s […]
So Much More Than a Headache: Understanding Migraine through Literature
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Kathleen J. O’Shea. The Kent State University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-60635-403-2 Can language ever fully represent pain? Much writing about illness returns us to that question, including two books published this year: Pain: The Science of the Feeling Brain and Ouch!: Why Pain Hurts, and Why It Doesn’t Have […]
Civilian Lunatic Asylums During the First World War: A Study of Austerity on London’s Fringe
Book Review by Peter Tyrer Claire Hilton. Palgrave MacMillan, 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-54870-4 The moral status of a country can be determined by its treatment of the mentally ill. On this count Norway and Sweden do well, Russia and the US do badly, and the United Kingdom is in between. But was it always thus? This […]
Book Review: Claire Hilton on “Staring Night” by Robert Abrams.
Staring Night: Queen Victoria’s Late-life Depression by Robert C Abrams (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-949093-55-1) by Claire Hilton MD PhD FRCPsych, Historian in Residence, Royal College of Psychiatrists, 21 Prescot St, London E1 8BB, UK historian@rcpsych.ac.uk In the last few months of her life, Queen Victoria was solemn, sad, and fearful, yet […]
Book Review: “Body Talk in the Medical Humanities: Whose Language”
by Teodora Manea Jennifer Patterson and Francia Kinchington (eds): Body Talk in the Medical Humanities: Whose Language, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, pp. 311 This book explores different discourses around the body, focusing on the idea of body-talk and body language. The complexity of this topic is generated by the fact that we […]
Book Review: “Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History”
by Manali Karmakar Virdi, Jaipreet. Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. 319 pp. Jaipreet Virdi’s Hearing Happiness dives deep into the existential and embodied anxieties of deaf individuals by tracing the evolution of deafness cures from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-first Century. Virdi’s book, on the one […]