In an article for our June special issue “Pain and its Paradoxes”, “Pain as Performance: Re-Virginisation in Turkey,” Hande Güzel turns to an analysis of acute pain related to re-virginisation, a surgical process of hymenoplasty that women in Turkey undertake to satisfy social expectations regarding virginity upon marriage. These expectations lead to the performance of what […]
Tag: research
Adaptive Frameworks of Chronic Pain: Daily Remakings of Pain and Care at a Somali Refugee Women’s Health Centre
In her article from our June special issue, “Pain and its Paradoxes”, Kari Campeau investigates how Somali women living in the US understand their experience of chronic pain, its treatment and their strategies for coping with that pain in her study, “Adaptive Frameworks of Chronic Pain: Daily Remakings of Pain and Care at a Somali […]
Shifting Understandings of Labour Pain in Canadian Medical History
Here we continue showcasing articles from our June special issue on “Pain and its Paradoxes”. Beginning with the observation that the pain associated with childbirth is a universal biological reality, Whitney Wood, in her article “Shifting Understandings of Labour Pain in Canadian Medical History,” explores how such pain is nevertheless understood in different ways by […]
Before Narrative: Episodic Reading and Representations of Chronic Pain
In “Before Narrative: Episodic Reading and Representations of Chronic Pain,” an article in our June special issue on “Pain and its Paradoxes”, Sara Wasson counterpoises fragmentary, incomplete and episodic forms of writing to teleogenetic narratives that make the experience of chronic pain coherent and, in doing so, risk marginalising the voices of those whose experience does […]
Crossing Borders: March Issue 44.1
In this, our March issue, Medical Humanities presents articles that speak across borders, part of an interdisciplinary conversation. As EIC Brandy Schillace explains in the editorial (available here), “While not a themed issue, the articles featured here do represent a trend—and in many ways, this trend offers a promising future.” We are excited to share […]
Daniel Goldberg on Shame, Stigma and Medicine
The current issue of Medical Humanities is guest-edited by Luna Dolezal and Barry Lyons and focuses on ‘Shame, Stigma and Medicine’. Daniel S. Goldberg’s article, ‘Pain, objectivity and history: understanding pain stigma,’ is our editor’s choice in this issue, and so is free for everyone to access. In the article, Goldberg argues that sufferers […]
Deborah Bowman on Shame, Stigma and Medicine
The current issue of Medical Humanities is guest-edited by Luna Dolezal and Barry Lyons and focuses on ‘Shame, Stigma and Medicine’. Deborah Bowman turns to drama to ask how theatre is well-placed to explore the impact of shame in the clinical setting in her paper, ‘Vulnerability, Survival and Shame in Nina Rainer’s Tiger Country.’ Drawn […]
MH’s Jane Austen Research Paper Universally Acknowledged
The latest issue of Medical Humanities, published on December 1st, features an original paper in which KG White argues that tuberculosis, and not Addison’s Disease, may have killed Jane Austen, one of the world’s favourite authors. The popular appeal of stories about Austen was evidenced by the rapid take up of this story by the world’s […]
House MD: just what the doctor ordered
http://www.fox.com/house/gallery/ Back in the mid-80s when, as a junior doctor, I went to work in the US, I caused a mini-panic amongst the nurses by refusing, at least for a short while, to sign “MD” after my orders. An order in this context being a written order to the nurses to do the myriad of […]
Rubens and the art of observation: a dying clinical skill?
Peter Paul Rubens. Helene Fourment in a fur wrap (Het Pelsken). c.1635. Oil on panel, 176×83 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Do you ever really look at your patients? I mean really, really, look, so carefully that you’re in danger of making both of you feel uncomfortable? And if you do, do you look with the eye of […]