Physicians and Patients Should Be Steering the Healthcare Ship

Book Review by Janina Levin Drew Remignanti, The Healing Connection: A Partnership for Your Health (Something or Other Publishing, 2023. ISBN-13:‎ 978-1954102156). Analyses of healthcare of systems in the US (and the UK) have laid bare alarming asymmetries of power. Hypocrisy is the hidden message in medical education. Insurance companies and hospital administrators influence doctors’ […]

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The Doctor Will Not See You Now

Blog by Drew Remignanti, MD, MPH “The boundaries between health and disease, between well and sick, are far from clear and never will be clear, for they are diffused by cultural, social, and psychological considerations.” So wrote Dr. George L. Engel in 1977, when he proposed his biopsychosocial model of illness. The bolding of never […]

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How Chance Occurrences Can Affect Your Health

Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham. Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients And Shape Our Health (Doubleday, 2023. ISBN-13:‎ 978-0385548816). Book Review by Dr. Isabella Watts Random Acts of Medicine opens with the line “chance occurrences change the course of our lives all the time.” We can all think […]

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December 2023 Special Issue: Transitions & Transformations: Medical Humanities in Times of COVID-19

Medical Humanities in Transition Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Anna M Elsner Postdigital health practices: new directions in medical humanities Monika Pietrzak-Franger Solidarity during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from a nine-country interview study in Europe [read the article summary] Katharina Kieslich, Amelia Fiske, Marie Gaille, Ilaria Galasso, Susi Geiger, Nora Hangel, Ruth Horn, Marjolein Lanzing, Sébastien Libert, Elisa […]

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The Idea of Medicine as Poetry: Alan Bleakley’s “Keats’ Lexicon”

The Bio-Illogical (Liverpool: The Artel Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1739900335). Book Review by Dr. Shane Neilson Alan Bleakley knows a thing or two about Keats. As an emeritus professor of medical education and medical humanities at Plymouth University Peninsula Medical School, one of his areas of scholarly interest has been increasing medical learners and practitioners’ tolerance […]

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Hanna Rion and The Weekly Dispatch’s Twilight Sleep Crusade

Article Summary by Eleanor Taylor 1847 was a momentous year in the history obstetric anaesthetic, as well as the history of medicine, with James Young Simpson’s discovery of the anaesthetic properties of chloroform. For the next fifty years, chloroform was the anaesthetic of choice. However, in the early 1900s, a new method of obstetric pain […]

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Prostheses of Disability: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Disabled Body in Postcolonial Arab Fiction

Article Summary by Abir Hamdar What is the relationship between disability and Islamic fundamentalism? To answer this question, this essay explores the representation of disability in postcolonial Arab fiction about Islamic fundamentalism and in particular, the significance of the prosthesis: an artificial device that substitutes for a missing part of the body. As the essay […]

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Gender, Race and Class at Work: Enlisting African Health Labour into the Gold Coast Medical Service, 1860–1957

Article Summary by Lucky Tomdi This article is part of an ongoing project that examines the historical roles and experiences of African health workers in Ghana during the late 19th and 20th centuries. It examines how gender, race, and class shaped the participation of Africans in colonial and Christian missionary biomedical services from 1860 to […]

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(Post)confessional Mode and Psychological Surveillance in The Crown and Fleabag

Article Summary by Sarah Hagaman Two fictional therapy sessions are at the heart of my article, “(Post)confessional Mode and Psychological Surveillance in The Crown and Fleabag.” In Season 4 of The Crown, Princess Margaret—the Queen’s younger sister—discovers she may suffer from a hereditary mental illness. The second, Season 2 of Fleabag shows a short, bizarre […]

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