Book Review by Jennifer Bracken Scott Edited by Deborah Padfield and Joanna M. Zakrzewska ISBN: 9781787352636 UCL Press, 2021 Full text of book is available online at https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10120621/1/Encountering-Pain.pdf Pain is an important indicator that something is wrong in the body. But pain is also invisible and immeasurable to anyone besides the patient; while an […]
Tag: Review
Sanatorium
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Abi Palmer. Penned in the Margins, 2020. 9781908058713 Teresa of Avila, the Saint Teresa immortalised by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s electrifying marble sculpture, was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and mystic. She became a local celebrity for her raptures, which, according to those who witnessed her ecstatic spiritual experiences, regularly involved […]
Confronting Toxic Memories
Film review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine ‘Curfew’ (written and directed by Amir Ramses, Egypt, 2020). Spoiler alert: this review reveals significant plot details. Curfew is a stirring drama about parental sacrifice and the dynamics of reconciliation between a mother and daughter. Along the way, the clinical picture of childhood sexual abuse, its […]
Lithium: A Doctor, A Drug, and a Breakthrough
Book review by Laura Grace Simpkins Walter A. Brown. Liveright. 2020. ISBN 9781631497902 I was prescribed lithium carbonate—two 400mg tablets to be gulped down with a large glug of water before bed—nearly four years ago. For a while I knew only several vague details about my medication: it was ‘natural’, it could easily be ‘toxic’, […]
Daring to Hope
Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York Review of ‘This Little Life’ (directed by Sarah Gavron, UK 2003) ‘This Little Life’ explores several timeless themes; it focuses on parental attachment and mourning in the specific circumstances raised by the birth of a premature infant and shines no less a revealing light on […]
Performance, Medicine and the Human
Book Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Mermikides, Alex. Performance, Medicine and the Human. Methuen Drama, 2020. ISBN: 9781350022157. In 2005, US Senator Sam Brownback sponsored a bill seeking to outlaw the creation of “human chimeras,” arguing that the mere existence of “chimeras”—embryos that incorporate cellular material borrowed from either a non-human or another human source—“raises […]
Get On With You!
Review by Robert C. Abrams, M.D. Field Light, Owen Lewis At the heart of Owen Lewis’ latest collection of poems, Field Light, is the story of a middle-aged man at a multi-focal impasse—emotional, temporal, marital, professional. That man is Lewis himself, who finds himself unable to move beyond a crucial juncture in his life. The […]
Making Bodies Kosher: The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England
Book Review by Angela Davis Ben Kasstan. Making Bodies Kosher: The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England. Berghahn Books, 2019. 286 pages. ISBN: 9781789202281. In Making Bodies Kosher, Ben Kasstan, a social and medical anthropologist, explores how Haredi (strictly religiously observant) Jews navigate the complexities of engaging with biomedical maternity and infant health […]
The Best of Intentions
Film Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine ‘Papa’, directed by Natalie Labarre (2016, USA) Papa is a bright, fast-moving animation, delightful to watch, but in just over 6 minutes more complex and nuanced than one realizes at first. The film is an autobiographical take by the director Natalie […]
Beyond Remedy
Film Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York. Review of Skin (2018), directed by Guy Nattiv, USA. “You have to be taught …to hate and fear…before you are six or seven or eight …you have to be carefully taught” Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II for the musical ‘South Pacific’ (1958).[1] These wise, […]