Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021.
(Source: Journal of Medical Humanities)
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 8, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
In/Fertile Monsters: The Emancipatory Significance of Representations of Women on Infertility Reality TV
This article examines the emancipatory significance of representations of women on 'infertility reality TV shows'. While the women in these shows all have 'abnormal' qualities, we consider their portrayal as figurations of monstrosity. In the literature, monstrosity is understood as a way to challenge nonemancipatory norms by offering an alternative identity. Through a content analysis of seven reality TV shows, we identified four types of in/fertile monsters: the cyborg, the freak, the abject, and the childless. We show that these monsters are predominantly non-emancipatory as they all involve mechanisms of altering, excl...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
How Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy Does the Body, or Why Epistemology Alone Cannot Explain this Controversial Breast Cancer Treatment
AbstractSince the late 1990s, the use of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) to treat unilateral breast cancer has been on the rise. Over the past two decades, dozens of studies have been conducted in order to understand this trend, which has puzzled and frustrated physicians who find it at odds with efforts to curb the surgical overtreatment of breast cancer, as well as with evidence-based medicine, which has established that the procedure has little oncologic benefit for most patients. Based on the work of Annemarie Mol and John Law, this paper argues that these efforts to understand increased CPM use are limited...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Saadat Hasan Manto, Partition, and Mental Illness through the Lens of Toba Tek Singh
Abstract“Toba Tek Singh,” which describes the exchange of mental asylum inmates between India and Pakistan in the wake of partition, was perhaps Saadat Hasan Manto’s most well-known short story. Manto’s work was coloured by his experience of mental illness, including alcohol addiction and possible d epressive disorder. This essay attempts to use “Toba Tek Singh” as a lens through which to shine an integrative light on the role of mental illness in Manto’s work and life, by discussing his personal experiences, themes of mental illness in the story, and the implications of his writing in th e historical context...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Graphic Medicine and the Critique of Contemporary U.S. Healthcare
AbstractComics has always had a critical engagement with socio-political and cultural issues and hence evolved into a medium with a subversive power to challenge the status quo. Staying true to the criticality of the medium, graphic medicine (where comics intersects with the discourse of healthcare) critiques the exploitative and unethical practices in the field of healthcare, thereby creating a critical consciousness in the reader. In close reading select graphic pathographies such as Gabby Schulz'sSick (2016), Emily Steinberg'sBroken Eggs (2014), Ellen Forney'sMarbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo& Me (2012) and M...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Authorship in the Medical Humanities: Breaking Cross-field Boundaries or Maintaining Disciplinary Divides?
ConclusionsDespite considerable involvement from both humanities and medical practitioners, there is still substantial scope for enhanced emphasis on collaborative (multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary) seminars and exchanges in the medical humanities and editorial policies to promote transparency of the nature of collaborative work among disciplines. Journal editors and editorial boards should reflect on the opportunity to promote enhanced visibility of joint work in scholarship in the medical humanities through reflection and review of current editorial policies. (Source: Journal of Medical Humanities)
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Constructing the Gendered Risk of Illness in Lyrica Ads for Fibromyalgia: Fear of Isolation as a Motivating Narrative for Consumer Demand
AbstractDirect-to-consumer television advertisements forLyrica in the United States create narratives of gendered domestic normalcy to which women with fibromyalgia are encouraged to aspire through pharmaceutical intervention. This paper unpacks images and narratives within these advertisements to demonstrate that they rely on metaphors that represent gendered expectations in order to evoke guilt and provoke a desire for what Joseph Dumit calls “health as risk reduction,” and what I argue is an attempt to show disability being erased. Following Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model of communication, viewers play a ro...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums
AbstractNineteenth-century psychiatrists ascribed to a model of health that was predicated on the existence of objective and strictly defined laws of nature. The allegedly “natural” rules governing the production of consumption of food, however, were structured by a set of distinctively bourgeois moral values that demonized over-indulgence and intemperance, encouraged self-discipline and productivity, and treated gentility as an index of social worth. Accordingly, the asylum acted not only as a therapeutic instrument but also as a moral machine that was designed to remake lazy, indolent transgressors into useful, “de...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Ailing Hearts and Troubled Minds: An Historical and Narratological Study on Illness Narratives by Physicians with Cardiac Disease
This article explores the experience of illness among physicians by applying an historical, narratological approach to three doctor ’s narratives about personal cases of cardiac disease: Max Pinner’s from the 1940s, Robert Seaver’s from the 1980s, and John Mulligan’s from 2015. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s principles of social interaction, I argue that part of the challenge in the analysed narratives is because when doc tors seek medical attention for themselves, the ensuing medical ‘drama’ suffers. I compare the three narratives to argue that the experience of becoming a patient while simultaneously remaining...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
‘The Good Doctor’: the Making and Unmaking of the Physician Self in Contemporary South Africa
AbstractIn this article we examine the figure of the doctor in animated debates around public sector medicine in contemporary South Africa. The loss of health professionals from the South African public system is a key contributor to the present healthcare crisis. South African medical schools have revised curricula to engage trainee doctors with a broader set of social concerns, but the disjunctures between training, health systems failures, and a high disease burden call into question whether junior doctors are adequately prepared or whether conditions of care extend beyond medical training. A concern with 'resilience' s...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The Production of Space in Richard Selzer ’s Wartime Story “The Whistlers’ Room”
AbstractThis essay applies Henri Lefebvre ’s notion of the production of space, particularly his conceptualization of the tension formed by the perceived-conceived-lived triad to analyze how space is produced in wartime hospitals as demonstrated in Richard Selzer’s “The Whistlers’ Room.” Wounded soldiers participate in producing t he triad of the social space of military hospitals through their multilayered performances as fighting soldiers serving the nation and as living human beings longing for human connections. Contradictory performances demonstrate the strategic positioning of wounded soldiers as active pro...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Voices from the Newspaper Club: Patient Life at a State Psychiatric Hospital (1988-1992)
AbstractThe authors conducted a qualitative analysis of thirty-seven issues ofThe DDU Review, a newsletter produced by residents of the Dual Diagnosis Unit, a residential unit for people who had diagnoses of developmental disability and serious mental illness in the Central State Hospital (Indiana, USA). The analysis of the newsletters produced between September 1988 and June 1992 revealed three major themes: 1) the mundane; 2) good behavior; and 3) advocacy. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, the discourse of medicalization—such as relations with physicians, diagnoses, and medications—receive little attentio...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Passing Strategies and Performative Identities: Coping with (In)Visible Chronic Diseases
AbstractIn this article I consider the role of passing and performance in the everyday lives of alkaptonuria (AKU) and vitiligo patients. Race, LGBTQ, gender and disability scholars have long used the term passing to describe sub-groups of people within marginal populations who intentionally manipulate their bodies or alter their behaviour in order to claim identities that are not socially assigned to them at birth. In this paper I demonstrate the effectiveness of the passing strategies that patients use in order to mitigate their disease symptoms and render them invisible, thus enabling them to pass as “healthy” or un...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Tragic Affirmation: Disability Beyond Optimism and Pessimism
AbstractTragedy is a founding theme in disability studies. Critical disability studies have, since their inception, argued that understandings of disability as tragedy obscure the political dimensions of disability and are a barrier facing disabled persons in society. In this paper, we propose an affirmative understanding of tragedy, employing the philosophical works of Nietzsche, Spinoza and Hasana Sharp. Tragedy is not, we argue, something to be opposed by disability politics; we can affirm life within it. To make our case, we look to an ongoing ethnography of two Canadian children ’s rehabilitation clinics. Looking to...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - March 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
