'Working in a comfort formerly unknown: medical holism and the radical ambitions behind interwar Bermondseys foot clinic
In 1930, the Bermondsey Public Health Department made the rather unusual decision to establish the first municipal foot clinic in Britain. This pioneering and popular clinic was founded at a time when the aims of public health were being renegotiated. Historical discussion of the reconceptualisation of public health in the interwar period typically depicts a paradigm shift in which public health was no longer focused solely on sanitising the physical environment, but was characterised by an additional, separate aim: the development of hygienic behaviour within patients. While this narrative has proved helpful in explaining...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Mitchell, C. T. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
African perspectives of moral status: a framework for evaluating global bioethical issues
This paper offers an African perspective on moral status grounded on an understanding of personhood. These concepts are key to understanding the differences in emphasis and the values at play when global ethical issues are analysed within the African context. Drawing from African philosophical reflections on the descriptive and normative concepts of personhood, I propose a dual notion of subject and object moral status. I explain how object moral status, duties owed to persons, is differently grounded with respect to subject moral status, which refers to communally directed agency. This distinction influences the African w...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Atuire, C. A. Tags: Editor's choice Original research Source Type: research
In good hands: the phenomenological significance of human touch for nursing practices
Prevailing understandings of the nurse’s touch tend to be focused on its consoling, instrumental and communicative utility. What seems to be missing is an exploration of the ethical and existential significance of the nurse’s touch. As an aspect of nearly every human experience, touch has a depth and breadth of meanings that are hard to compass. We experience the world through our bodies, feeling our way through our lives. In the nurse’s world, touching contact with the person in care is often considered to be a fundamental gesture, inherent to nursing practices. Still, touch is often hidden, subsumed by ...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Lemermeyer, G. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Decolonising 'man, resituating pandemic: an intervention in the pathogenesis of colonial capitalism
This paper brings together fifth-wave public health theory and a decolonised approach to the human informed by the Caribbean thinker, Sylvia Wynter, and the primary exponent of African Humanism, Es’kia Mpahlele. Sub-Saharan indigenous ways of thinking the human as co-constitutive in a subject we might call human-animal-‘environment’, in conjunction with the subcontinent’s experiences of colonial damage in disease ‘prevention’ and ‘treatment’, demonstrate the lack of genuine engagement with Indigenous wisdom in Western medical practice.
The paper offers a decolonial reading of...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Jolly, R. J. Tags: Open access, COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
COVID-19 narratives and layered temporality
The essay outlines the ways in which narrative approaches to COVID-19 can draw on imaginative literature and critical oral history to resist the ‘closure’ often offered by cultural representations of epidemics. To support this goal, it analyses science and speculative fiction by Alejandro Morales and Tananarive Due in terms of how these works create alternative temporalities, which undermine colonial and racist medical discourse. The essay then examines a new archive of emerging autobiographical illness narratives, namely online Facebook posts and oral history samples by 'long COVID' survivors, for their altern...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Howell, J. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
Global health wars: a rhetorical review of global health critique
The critique of global health is a longstanding tradition in the global health humanities (GHH). Typically, this critique takes an expected tack: critics take a slice of global health, identify its rhetoric, expose its power, and elucidate its unanticipated consequences. Here, I subject global health critique to its own approach—conducting a ‘rhetorical review’ of global health critique in order to ascertain whether it has rhetoric, power and unanticipated consequences of its own. Following this review, I find that global health critique has a rhetoric, and that this rhetoric can be organised into three t...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Baldwinson, R. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
When numbers eclipse narratives: a cultural-political critique of the 'ethical impacts of short-term experiences in global health in Dominican Republic bateyes
With the rising demand for short-term experiences in global health (STEGH) is an ever-increasing volume of literature that focuses attention on ethics and ethical concerns, such as the effects of STEGH on host populations. Such concerns have driven the development of ethical principles and guidelines, with discussions and debates largely centred around normative questions of positive/negative and benefit/harm for us/them. Using a critical medical humanities lens, this paper blurs these dichotomous framings and offers a more complex understanding of the effects and effectiveness of STEGH on hosts. I explore STEGH that send ...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Wilson, B. K. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Parasites and priorities: the early evolution of 'neglected disease initiatives and the history of a global health agenda
This article explores the development and evolution of ‘neglected tropical diseases’ (NTDs) as an operative and imaginative category in global public health, focusing on the early intellectual and institutional development of the category in the 1970s. It examines early work around ‘neglected’ diseases in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Health Sciences Division, specifically the Foundation’s ‘Great Neglected Diseases of Mankind’ initiative that ran between 1978 and 1988, as well as intersections with the WHO’s parallel Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropica...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Webel, M. K. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Exploring the intersection of critical disability studies, humanities and global health through a case study of scarf injuries in Bangladesh
This article puts critical disability studies and global health into conversation around the phenomenon of scarf injury in Bangladesh. Scarf injury occurs when a woman wearing a long, traditional scarf called an orna rides in a recently introduced autorickshaw with a design flaw that allows the orna to become entangled in the vehicle’s driveshaft. Caught in the engine, the orna pulls the woman’s neck into hyperextension, causing a debilitating high cervical spinal cord injury and quadriplegia. The circumstances of the scarf injury reveal the need for more critical cultural analysis than the fields of global hea...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tupetz, A., Quirici, M., Sultana, M., Hoque, K. I., Stewart, K. A., Landry, M. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Biocolonial pregnancies: Louise Erdrichs Future Home of the Living God (2017)
This article argues that the health humanities must examine biocolonialism (and representations thereof) if it is to attend to Native American experiences of reproductive healthcare in the USA. Reproductive healthcare abuses are brought into dialogue with Native American resistance to Western biomedical sciences in Future Home of the Living God (2017) by Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe). Written over the course of two reinstatements of the Mexico City Policy, Erdrich’s novel invites a consideration of biocolonialism in relation to the exploitation and policing of female bodies.
After a discussion of bioprospecting and female ...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Kemball, A. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Xenotransplantation and borders: two Indian narratives
This paper examines two Indian texts, Anand Gandhi’s film The Ship of Theseus (2012) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Harvest (1998), which deal with complex biopolitical and geopolitical questions around organ transplantation, for their treatment of corporeal, geopolitical and ethical borders.
By dramatising the lives of carriers who are both receivers and donors, the texts enact boundaries, visible and invisible, from both sides. I focus on the carrier of the diseased organ—already a stranger, as Jean-Luc Nancy describes his own failing heart in L’Intrus (2000)—and the carrier of the alien org...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Srihari, M. Tags: Commentary Source Type: research
Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayos Mother India
This essay explores repressed hostility and punitive fantasies in the discourse of international health, using Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Multiple tendencies in interwar thinking converge in Mayo’s book, making it a veritable archive of major, minor and emergent forces, including those shaping the phenomenon of ‘international health’ post-Versailles. Mother India provides a unique opportunity to explore how progressive principles of international public health tend to obscure a ‘minor’ and forgettable yet disturbing truth: the discourse on life and health can ‘safely&rsq...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Shetty, S. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Sea of bodies: a medical discourse of the refugee crisis in Tears of Salt: A Doctors Story
This article reconfigures the detachment between the human as a socially constructed centre of subjectivity and the body in pain. The corporeality of illness and death that migrants face positions them in an abject position and distances them farther from the rhetoric of human rights. The ontological being of these individuals in medical discourse rarely goes beyond acknowledging that it is normal and expected for these bodies to be in pain. In what ways can we in the humanities gear the discussion towards the raw physicality of fragmentation, distortion and rejection of refugees and immigrants? What role can such a view p...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Asaad, L., Spencer, M. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Global Health Humanities in transition
This special issue on the Global Health Humanities originally was conceptualised before the COVID-19 pandemic began, and then grew into fruition during the height of a global health crisis. As co-editors, we agreed that the advent of the pandemic necessitated a critical re-evaluation of the basic tenets of Global Health Humanities as a developing field. The project has been shaped during a moment in which daily news and information around issues of health, contagion and global interconnectedness have asked us to shift and rethink the very questions that need to be posed. Therefore, the issue not only seeks to represent the...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Hassan, N., Howell, J. Tags: Editorial Source Type: research
Narrative trajectories of disaster response: ethical preparedness from Katrina to COVID-19
While COVID-19 brings unprecedented challenges to the US healthcare system, understanding narratives of historical disasters illuminates ethical complexities shared with COVID-19. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina revealed a lack of disaster preparation and protocol, not dissimilar to the challenges faced by COVID-19 healthcare workers. A case study of Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina reported by journalist-MD Sheri Fink reveals unique ethical challenges at the forefront of health crises. These challenges include disproportionate suffering in structurally vulnerable populations, as seen in COVID-19 where marginalised gr...
Source: Medical Humanities - June 7, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Iwai, Y., Holdren, S., Rosen, L. T., Hu, N. Y. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
