Meanings of Pain edited by Simon van Rysewyk. Springer International Publishing, 2016, 401 pages, £126.50. Reviewed by Josie Billington (University of Liverpool), Andrew Jones, and James Ledson (The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust) In The Illness Narratives (1988), a seminal text for the Medical Humanities, Arthur Kleinman tells the story […]
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Book Review: Wellbeing Machine
Wellbeing Machine: How Health Emerges from the Assemblages of Everyday Life by Kim McLeod, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2017, 234 pages, $39.00. Violeta Ruiz, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Kim McLeod’s Wellbeing Machine will probably be a difficult book to follow for any reader who is not familiar with Deleuzian and posthumanist ideas. I […]
Beautiful/ Dutiful Anhedonia
Film review: ‘My Father’, directed by Mohammed Adel, Egypt 2015 Reviewed by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell University, New York ‘My Father’ is a subtly crafted short film of unusual finesse that portrays the reality of caregiving for the elderly, particularly its emotional burdens and costs. An older man, wheelchair-bound and with a below-knee amputation, […]
Mohammed Adel on his short film, ‘My Father’
Egyptian director, Mohammed Adel, writes about his short film, ‘My Father’, which shows the difficulties of caring for his father in the weeks before his death. Writing about my short documentary film ‘My Father’ is not an easy task, just like when I started thinking of making the film itself. This is not because ‘writing’ […]
Book Review: What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear
What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear by Danielle Ofri, Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2017, 288 pages, £21.99. Reviewed by Ben Bravery It is the oldest tool in any doctor’s bag, and it is as important today as it was 200 years ago. It is not a device, gadget or pill. The side-effects are […]
The Doctor as a Humanist – a Solution to Uncertainty?
Jonathan McFarland, (Sechenov University), Annalisa Manca (Queen’s University, Belfast), and Irina Markovina (Sechenov University) describe their upcoming symposium, “Can the Humanities Transform 21st Century Medicine?” In October 2017, the first “The Doctor as a Humanist” symposium will be held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, with the following subtitle “Can the Humanities Transform 21st Century Medicine?” The symposium […]
When Truth Speaks: Discourses of the Voice in Medicine
Dr Ayesha Ahmad, Global Health Humanities Correspondent, has been travelling in Afghanistan and Nepal and meeting women who’s lived experience is a conflict of chronic gender-based violence. Her initiatives are to integrate storytelling into mental health trauma interventions globally in contexts of war, oppression of women’s speech, violence towards women and girls, and writing against […]
“Congenital Glaucoma”: Commentary
Dr Richard Ratzan gives us a commentary on his poem “Congenital Glaucoma, published in BMJ Medical Humanities, and explains why he decided to write about this case using the sonnet form. This little girl – she was probably about 13 or 14; I don’t remember since it was about 10 years ago – was from […]
Book Review: Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice
Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines by M Buchbinder, M Rivkin-Fish and RL Walker (eds). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016, 320 pages, £37.50. Reviewed by Professor John Harrington, Cardiff University Inequality has returned to the political agenda in Europe and North America in the aftermath of the […]
CFP: Pain and its Paradoxes
BMJ Medical Humanities will host a special issue on PAIN in June 2018! We want you to be part of it! Title: Pain and its Paradoxes Abstract Deadline: August 1, 2017 Final Submission Deadline: October 1, 2017 (publication date June 2018) Pain is almost certainly the most common illness experience on the planet. Yet, it […]