Article Summary by Rachel Irwin We are surrounded by health data, which became even more evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. Each day, newspapers published graphs and heat maps showing new cases. It is was not only epidemiologists, virologists and policy-makers who were interested in data, but also the general public and social media users who […]
Tag: research
Hearing Spiritually Significant Voices: A Phenomenological Survey and Taxonomy
Article Summary by Christopher C.H. Cook When people hear a voice in the absence of any objectively present speaker, these voices are professionally understood as auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), but those who hear such voices do not see them in this way. We surveyed a predominantly Christian group of 58 people who reported hearing spiritually […]
The Heart in Medicine, History and Culture
The heart in medicine, history and culture [read the article summary] Therese Feiler, Joshua Hordern Sacred hearts and pumps: cardiology and the conflicted body politic (1500–1900) Therese Feiler The haunted heart and the Holy Ghost: on retrieval, donation and death [read the article summary] Joshua Hordern Heart surgery and transplantation: innovations impacting on concepts of […]
December 2021 Special Issue: Transplantation and its Imaginaries
Transplantation: changing biotechnologies and imaginaries Donna McCormack, Margrit Shildrick Hauntological dimensions of heart transplantation: the onto-epistemologies of deceased donation Margrit Shildrick The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities Donna McCormack Faecal microbiota transplants: towards a healthy disgust scepticism Jessica Houf ‘Dirty pigs’ and the xenotransplantation paradox Gill Haddow May I have your […]
June 2022 Special Issue: Global Health Humanities
Global Health Humanities in transition Narin Hassan, Jessica Howell Sea of bodies: a medical discourse of the refugee crisis in Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story [read the article summary] Lava Asaad, Matthew Spencer Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India [read the article summary] Sandhya Shetty Xenotransplantation […]
‘Creative Ferment’: Abortion and Reproductive Agency in Bessie Head’s Personal Choices Trilogy
Article Summary by Caitlin Stobie Using original archival research, this article examines representations of abortion in three novels by Bessie Head, an author who was born in South Africa and lived in Botswana for most of her life. I argue that Head documents both changing attitudes to terminations of pregnancy and dramatic environmental, medical, and […]
In “Torlak” We (Would) Trust: Domestic Vaccine Production in Contemporary Serbia
Article Summary by Marija Brujić An overly positive memory of life in socialist Yugoslavia, called Yugonostalgia, is very dominant among the public in contemporary Serbian post-socialist society. People who used to live in former Yugoslavia still talk with pride about the quality of life during that time, including the quality of its health system and […]
Decolonising ‘Man’, Resituating Pandemic: An Intervention in the Pathogenesis of Colonial Capitalism
Article Summary by Rosemary J Jolly I use the Humanities to expose how we conceive of the human as a construction that can be changed. I counter Enlightenment Man, the basic ‘unit’ of Western medicine, with the African humanism of Es’kia Mphahlele. Mpahlele describes humans as needing to live with, rather than exploiting, non-human animals […]
Living with COVID: What We Learned from Patients with Incurable Cancer During Challenging Times
Blog by Hilde M. Buiting, Xiaochang Campmans, Evelien van Alphen, Michel van den Heuvel and Gabe S. Sonke. Although COVID-19 impacted everyday life and destabilized the healthcare sector across the globe,1 few studies have focused on the experiences of patients with incurable cancer (infected or not). Can such patients serve as examples for understanding other […]
When Numbers Eclipse Narratives: A Cultural-Political Critique of the ‘Ethical’ Impacts of Short-Term Experiences in Global Health in Dominican Republic Bateyes
Article Summary by Brenda K. Wilson With short-term experiences in global health [STEGH] on the rise, it is increasingly important to better understand diverse effects on host populations. Much of the current literature on these issues uses the discipline of ethics to inform right/wrong ethical practice; moving beyond such normative benefit/harm reductionistic framings, this research […]