by Victoria Bates A Senior Lecturer in Modern History, Victoria Bates researches medico-legal history and the arts in medicine/healthcare at the University of Bristol. In this article for MH, she explores the role of “senses” in the construction and experience of “place,” principally by focusing on patients’ experiences of hospital care. By comparing two cancer narratives, […]
Tag: research
Genetics, Molar Pregnancies, and Medieval Ideas of Monstrous Births: The Lump of Flesh in The King of Tars
by Natalie Goodison What’s fascinating about this paper is that it’s a collaboration between geneticists and medievalists—and this very rich perspective led me to rethink what the Middle Ages considered fact/fictitious. It begins with a fictional story, within which a woman gives birth to a lump of flesh. When I first read about this lump, […]
Call of Interest: Collaborative Irish Medical Illustration Project
The libraries and cultural heritage units of Trinity College Dublin, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland and University College Dublin are planning a collaborative digitisation project in 2019 and we would like to hear your opinion/thoughts/research interest in it. This collaborative project entails making available online a unique and distinct archival collection of Dublin medical […]
Smoking and lung cancer paradox in Kerala: An Epidemiological Epiphany
Smoking and lung cancer paradox in Kerala: An Epidemiological Epiphany In this blog post Professors Kesavan Rajasekharan Nayar and Raghu Ram K. Nair highlight the emerging smoking-lung cancer paradox in Kerala and posit some tentative explanations. The BMJ played a historical role in establishing the relationship between smoking and lung cancer way back in the […]
Living Archives and Dying Wards: Reflections on Medical Archives in Eastern Africa
by Dr. Mika Marissa I am currently writing a book on the history of the Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI). I tell the story of how a small experimental chemotherapy research site established by the Makerere department of surgery and the US National Cancer Institute in 1967 remained open during a long period of political instability, […]
Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction [book review]
Anne Whitehead, Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) 224 pages, £75.00 ISBN 9780748686186 (Paperback forthcoming in May 2019). by Marie Allitt. In order to unravel the concept of empathy, Anne Whitehead engages with many of the increasingly relevant and problematic topics in both medicine and medical humanities today, […]
Biomedicine and the Humanities: Growing Pains
In this article for December’s Special Issue, Hume, Mulemi, and Sadok take a look at the unique challenges facing humanities researchers in clinical and community health settings in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. Their work considers these experiences within the broader context—but our broader context of disciplinary ’ethnocentrism’ that hampers the development of knowledge in […]
Walking Up Hills, Through History, And In-Between Disciplines: MHH And Health Sciences Education At The Tip Of Africa
by Carla Tsampiras Celebration, frustration, contestation, and imagination all manifest themselves when examining the evolution of the field of Medical and Health Humanities (MHH) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). That this field has been growing at the same time as access to, inclusion in, and social justice issues linked to higher education have […]
Field Notes in the Clinic on Medicine, Anthropology and Pedagogy in South Africa
by Michelle Pentecost In this commentary I draw on my experience working as a medical doctor and an anthropologist to explore what different disciplinary orientations allow us to ‘see’ in clinical settings. I argue that the anthropological skills of observation, privileging relationship, and of learning to foreground social context, have much to offer for teaching […]
Beyond the Lab: Eh!woza and Knowing Tuberculosis
by Bianca Masuku, Anastasia Koch, Ed Young, Digby Warner and Nolwazi Mkhwanazi The accompanying podcast offers a reflection on Eh!woza, a youth-based community engagement project focusing on tuberculosis (TB). Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Eh!woza functions as an interactive and interrogative platform, contrasting perspectives and concepts of TB as biomedical disease with personal experiences […]