In his article for our June special issue, ‘Pain and its Paradoxes’, Drew Leder looks at the intersections between those suffering chronic pain and those experiencing long-term incarceration in his article, ‘Coping with Chronic Pain, Illness and Incarceration: What Patients and Prisoners Have to Teach Each Other (and All of Us).’ Leder takes a phenomenological […]
Latest articles
Optimal Relief for Pain at the End of Life: A Caregiver’s Tale
In his article for our June special issue, “Pain and its Paradoxes”, David B. Morris offers a heartfelt account of his experience occupying a “third-person position” as an end-of-life caregiver to his late wife, Ruth C. Morris, and a reflection on the role of palliative pain-relief for the dying. Remarking on how biomedicine is often […]
Pain as Performance: Re-Virginisation in Turkey
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 […]
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 […]
June Special Issues: Pain and its Paradoxes
We are pleased to announce the June Special Issue of BMJ Medical Humanities on “Pain and its Paradoxes,” guest edited by Daniel Goldberg, PhD, Faculty at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado. This incredibly diverse issue looks carefully at the concept of pain cross-culturally and from a variety of disciplinary lenses. MH […]
‘Your Love Protects Me’: The Pleasures and Perils of Caregiving
América, directed by Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside, USA 2018 Showing on Saturday and Sunday 9th and 10th June at Sheffield Doc Fest, Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York Toward the end of the arresting film, América, a tour de force that depicts nearly […]
Wings
Today’s guest blog post comes from Rebecca Marshall who has just graduated from UCL Medical School having intercalated in Global Health. She is currently undertaking an MSc in Medical Anthropology (also at UCL). Her main interests include the intersections between medical anthropology, global health and bioethics. Here she writes about Wings, a recent play showing a […]
Book Review: Disability and the Welfare State in Britain
Jameel Hampton, Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy, 1948-1979 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016), 277 pp., $ 110.00 cloth, ISBN: 9781447316428. Reviewed by Sasha Mullally, University of New Brunswick From 1948 to 1979, British society might have been on a ‘collective train’ into an egalitarian social democratic future, but, as […]