Digital hermeneutics: scaled readings of online depression discourses
When it comes to understanding experiences of illness, humanities and social sciences research have traditionally reserved a prominent role for narrative. Yet, depression has characteristics that withstand the form of traditional narratives, such as a lack of desire and an impotence to act. How can a ‘datafied’ approach to online forms of depression writing pose a valuable addition to existing narrative approaches in health humanities? In this article, we analyse lay people’s depression discourses online. Our approach, ‘digital hermeneutics’, is inspired by Gadamer’s dialogical hermeneut...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: van de Ven, I., van Nuenen, T. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
'Capable of being in uncertainties: applied medical humanities in undergraduate medical education
This article arises from a collaboration between Imperial College London and Birkbeck, University of London, which aimed to embed the humanities into Imperial’s undergraduate medical curriculum. Here, we use a teaching session on graphic medicine and narrative as a case study to illustrate how the humanities can be a powerful tool for students to explore professional clinical complexity and uncertainty when taught in a transdisciplinary way. In this session, uncertainty operated on several different levels: the introduction of unfamiliar concepts, materials, and methods to students, transdisciplinary approaches to te...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Thacker, N., Wallis, J., Winning, J. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
'A Procedure Without a Problem, or the face transplant that didnt happen. The Royal Free, the Royal College of Surgeons and the challenge of surgical firsts
This article explores and explains the lack of a face transplant in the UK and draws attention to the complex emotional, institutional and international issues involved. Its findings have implications beyond the theme of face transplants, into the cultural contexts and practices in which surgical innovation takes place. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Bound Alberti, F., Hoyle, V. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Picturing sanity, in black and white
This speculative work grapples with a riddle: if white supremacy is noxious, and if it is inescapable, is apparent black health, black sanity, in fact healthy? In order to help the reader appropriately appreciate the feat that is black sanity, I begin with a treatment of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s literary character, Mr Golyadkin. I go on to extend my claim that Golyadkin’s ill health or lack of sanity can be understood in terms of the violation of the norms of sociality, onto Antonin Artaud. Dostoevsky and Artaud therefore provide case studies with which it is possible to begin to develop an outline of the bounds and...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Mukandi, B. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
'Creative Ferment: abortion and reproductive agency in Bessie Heads Personal Choices trilogy
Using original archival research from Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, this article examines representations of abortion in three novels by Bessie Head: When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971) and A Question of Power (1973). I argue that Bessie Head documents both changing attitudes to terminations of pregnancy and dramatic environmental, medical, and sociopolitical developments during southern Africa’s liberation struggles. Furthermore, her fictional writing queers materialism and its traditionally gender-dichotomous origins, presenting an understanding of development which exceeds temporal or national...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Stobie, C. E. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Science fiction authors perspectives on human genetic engineering
This article examines several differences between bioethicists, the general public and science fiction authors, and discusses how this community’s involvement might benefit proponents and opponents of gene editing. It also provides an overview of works mentioned by our respondents that might serve as useful references in the debate. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: So, D., Crocker, K., Sladek, R., Joly, Y. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Hearing spiritually significant voices: A phenomenological survey and taxonomy
Whereas previous research in the medical humanities has tended to neglect theology and religious studies, these disciplines sometimes have a very important contribution to make. The hearing of spiritually significant voices provides a case in point. The context, content and identity of these voices, all of which have typically not been seen as important in the assessment of auditory–verbal hallucinations (AVHs) within psychiatry, are key to understanding their spiritual significance. A taxonomy of spiritually significant voices is proposed, which takes into account frequency, context, affect and identity of the voice...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Cook, C. C. H., Powell, A., Alderson-Day, B., Woods, A. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Psychedelic injustice: should bioethics tune in to the voices of psychedelic-using communities?
Psychedelic compounds are regaining widespread interest due to emerging evidence surrounding their therapeutic effects. The controversial nature of these compounds highlights the need for extensive bioethical input to guide the process of medicalisation. To date there is no bioethics literature that consults the voices of psychedelic-using communities in order to help guide normative considerations of psychedelic medicalisation. In this paper I argue that psychedelic-using communities ought to be included in bioethical discussions that guide normative elements of psychedelic medicalisation. I argue this by presenting two p...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Miceli McMillan, R. Tags: Current controversy Source Type: research
Its about time: on the need of a temporal language for ecologically dimensioned medical humanities and public health scholarship
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted multiple system dependencies that urge us to rethink our relationship with other humans, non-humans and their various environments. Whereas a growing body of literature highlights the need for ecologically dimensioned medical humanities, focusing on where and how our healths unfold relationally through their ecologies, this paper argues that little attention has been paid to the when of health. In reply, this paper sets out to expand this understanding, first by grounding the ecological argument for medical humanities in a wider net of relational ontologies, and second by highlighting ...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Zielke, J. Tags: Current controversy Source Type: research
Casualties of the World War II metaphor: womens reproductive health fighting for narrative inclusion in COVID-19
This article explores the pandemic’s war metaphor through the lens of women’s reproductive health, arguing for a reframing of the metaphor. Narrative-building determines how health needs are perceived and addressed. A modification of the WWII metaphor can ensure that the narrative formulating around COVID-19 is inclusive of the women’s reproductive health needs that are eminently present. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Bailey, Y., Shankar, M., Phillips, P. Tags: COVID-19 Current controversy Source Type: research
Science fiction in bioethics: a role for feminist narratology
This article explores the various reasons science-fictional references feature so prominently in bioethical debate, particularly regarding emerging reproductive biotechnologies. It will reflect on how science-fictional references are often co-opted in bioethics scholarship to promote technoconservatism, before considering how bioethicists can engage more appropriately with this genre in practice. This will include a discussion of which kinds of texts might be best suited to stimulate meaningful debate, and how using tools of literary analysis, such as narratology, can maximise the potential benefits of uniting these fields...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Kendal, E. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
In Torlak we (would) trust: domestic vaccine production in contemporary Serbia
Throughout the era of socialist Yugoslavia, the Institute of Virology, Vaccines and Sera ‘Torlak’ in Belgrade was a well known producer and exporter of vaccines. After the dissolution of the country, it gradually lost its significance in both global and domestic vaccine markets. However, in Serbian public discourse, Torlak’s vaccines are still remembered as of the highest quality. Many people would willingly vaccinate themselves or their children with Torlak’s vaccines. But how do overly positive Yugoslav vaccination experiences influence vaccination narratives in contemporary postsocialist Serbia? ...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Brujic, M. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
A model for abolitionist narrative medicine pedagogy
We present relevant critiques of narrative medicine, case studies from workshop experiences, and close readings of selected narrative medicine texts to unmask limitations in the standard narrative medicine workshop format and illustrate the utility of our abolitionist model. The model we propose offers methods for disrupting long-standing patterns of inclusion (and exclusion) and radically transforming the structure of spaces and ideas produced within them. When new texts are added to the syllabus, they should be accompanied by hermeneutics that can adequately attend to them. Abolitionist narrative medicine pedagogy should...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Varman, P. M., Mosley, M. P., Christ, B. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
A logical development: biomedicines fingerprints are on the instrument of close reading in Charonian Narrative Medicine
Narrative Medicine as originated by Rita Charon began as an attempt to redress the unopposed biomedicalisation of the medical profession. Although the movement has been self-positioned as a corrective to deliver an ideal of care, it began within the rhetorical framework of biomedicine and not outside of it. Thus, Narrative Medicine justifies itself in biomedical terms, invoking instrumental rationales for its use. This seeming ‘scientification’ of narrative is only half of the biomedicine-indebted Narrative Medicine story. An equally important but as-yet unmentioned debt is the quasi-scientific origin story of ...
Source: Medical Humanities - August 22, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Neilson, S. Tags: Open access Current controversy Source Type: research
A 'prodigious latitude of words: vocabularies of illness in 18th-century medical treatises and womens writing
In its examination of a selection of 18th-century medical treatises and women’s writing, this essay considers a range of context-specific and historically specific medical vocabularies and tries to illuminate the various linguistic registers of physicians’ and women’s understandings and experiences of physio-emotional illness. In a preprofessionalised world in which medical and literary cultures overlapped significantly and medical knowledge was not yet restricted to a group of formally trained male elites, vocabularies of illness abounded, oftentimes moving freely between the permeable disciplinary bound...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Meek, H. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
