Article Summary by Luigi Tesio and Marco Buzzoni Suffering from an “illness without a disease” is a common condition. The person is suffering, but no abnormalities can be found in the body. This is the case for chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, many chronic pain syndromes, and most psychiatric disturbances. The article replies to the debate between […]
Tag: research
September 2021 Standard Issue
Gut feelings: depression as an embodied and affective phenomenon in Houellebecq’s Serotonin Jenny Slatman, Inge van de Ven The rationales for and challenges with employing arts-based health services research (ABHSR): a qualitative systematic review of primary studies [read the article summary] Umair Majid, Sujane Kandasamy An intellectual history of suffering in the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, […]
The Rationales for and Challenges with Employing Arts-based Health Services Research (ABHSR): A Qualitative Systematic Review of Primary Studies
Article Summary by Umair Majid We conducted a systematic review of 42 studies to identify the rationales for using arts-based research in health care. We found four rationales: (1) capture aspects of a topic that may be overlooked or ignored by other methods, (2) allow participants to reflect on their own experiences, (3) generate valuable […]
A Mirror in Fiction: Drawing Parallelisms Between Camus’s La Peste and COVID-19
Article Summary by César Pérez Romero Fiction is a particular mirror of reality. It does not look to merely reflect it: it tries to enhance it in order to build art from it. Nowadays, when the entire world faces an unprecedented public health crisis (COVID-19), taking a look at fiction about epidemics constitutes a highly […]
Representing Young Men’s Experience of Anorexia Nervosa A French-Language Case Study
Article Summary by Katie Jones This article analyses two young adult (YA) novels about young men’s experience of anorexia nervosa (AN), within the dual contexts of medical humanities research into literary depictions of illness, and the broader field of young adult literature about AN. While emphasising the importance of diverse literary narratives in order to […]
“From Disaster, Miracles are Wrought”: A Narrative Analysis of UK Media Depictions of Remote GP Consulting in the Covid-19 Pandemic Using Burke’s Pentad
Article Summary by Gilly Mroz This study used narrative analysis (the study of stories and storytelling) to explore how the mainstream media reacted to the shift from face-to-face to remote medical consultations during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. We used a conceptual framework developed some years ago by the literary theorist Kenneth Burke, which […]
Vivisection Through the Eyes of Wilkie Collins, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy
Article Summary by Jill Felicity Durey Before social media, novelists could help or hinder medical progress for humans and animals, as often their works were serialised. This article discusses the strong influence of Wilkie Collins, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy on public acceptance or rejection of the medical use of vivisection. Collins, in the nineteenth […]
Lessons from the Frontlines: A Junior Doctor’s Experience of the First Wave of the COVID-19 Epidemic in a Resource-Limited Setting
Article Summary by Brabaharan Subhani and Dilushi Wijayaratne Sri Lanka is a low middle-income country which has a dominant state-run health service that provides free healthcare. The high rates of literacy and welfare orientation have enabled the country to achieve favourable health outcomes at a relatively low cost. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has stretched our […]
Making Emergency Responders Visible: Working-class Responses to Industrial Disaster in Nineteenth-Century Journalism and Poetry
Article Summary by Rosalyn Buckland Hidden beneath the ground in coalmines, or behind the walls of factories, the injured bodies of workers have too often been overlooked. While the nineteenth-century saw workplaces become ever more dangerous, journalists struggled to tell these stories. Using poems by Joseph Skipsey, I challenge journalistic neglect in order to illuminate the actions […]
War of Conscience: Anti-Vaccination and the Battle for Medical Freedom During World War One
Article Summary by Susan McPherson Many high-income countries have relatively high COVID vaccination uptake among people vulnerable to disease. There is also significant ‘vaccine hesitancy’ in some groups. Doubts may be fuelled to some extent by anti-vaccination campaigns. The term ‘anti-vax’ tends to be used to criticise those engaged in or endorsing anti-vaccination as though […]