From blocked flows to suppressed emotions: the life of a trope
Internal blockages and build-ups cause disease: traditionally, this principle seemed intuitive both to professionals and the laity, explained conditions as diverse as melancholy and scurvy (among many others), and justified the use of evacuative treatments to get rid of noxious matter. With the collapse of humoral medicine and the establishment of the concept of specific causation, one might have expected time-honoured tropes of obstruction to die off. They did not die off, but moved with the times and adapted to new conditions. Emphasis swung from the noxious character of retained substances to the harms of suppressed urg...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Justman, S. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Health awareness as genre: the exigence of preparedness in cancer awareness campaigns and critical-illness insurance marketing
Dominant understandings of genre-as-form have limited our abilities to perceive health awareness: we recognise, and expect, health awareness campaigns from governmental and non-profit agencies. Inversely, we often fail to recognise, or name, health awareness as such when it comes from other sources, such as commercial marketing or advertisements for products. However, rhetorical genre theory centres attention on action brought about by form and, as such, rhetorical genre provides tools for recognising instances of health awareness often escape our notice. One such example is critical-illness insurance marketing. In this ar...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Gaudet, L. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
The dying patient: taboo, controversy and missing terms of reference for designers--an architectural perspective
Contemporary society has grown seemingly detached from the realities of growing old and subsequently, dying. A consequence, perhaps, of death becoming increasingly overmedicalised, nearly one in two UK nationals die institutional deaths. In this article we, two architectural scholars engaged in teaching, research and practice and a nurse and healthcare scholar with a focus on end-of-life care and peoples’ experiences, wish to draw attention to a controversy resulting from a paucity in current literature on the terms of reference of the dying ‘patient’ as we navigate the future implications of the COVID-19...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Bellamy, A., Clark, S., Anstey, S. Tags: COVID-19 Current controversy Source Type: research
Disability, relationship, and the negotiation of loss
Oppressive stereotypes of invalidity and tragedy have positioned loss and grieving as contested issues in the field of disability studies. Ascriptions of ‘denial’ are rejected by many disabled people, as a reductive medicalisation of their lived reality. For these and other reasons, this paper asserts that disabled people are afforded limited or awkward social spaces for grief, be it to do with social positioning, embodiment, or any other aspect of human experience. This is significant because grieving may have an important relationship with political mobilisation, both personal and collective. The paper presen...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Watermeyer, B., Mckinney, V. Tags: Editor's choice Original research Source Type: research
How care holds humanity: the myth of Cura and theories of care
This study adds to these bodies of work by using the original text from Hyginus in much greater detail. Textual analysis, theoretical discussions and autotheoretical work unpack care as (1) a fundamental aspect of the human condition, (2) a holding-together of different domains of knowledge, (3) a withholding from these domains and (4) the site of intimate knowledge that both ‘ontological domains’ struggle to grasp. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Hanisch, H. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Editors note
Welcome to the first issue of 2022! We have several exciting changes to announce in the new year. To begin with, we have been increasing our number of published submissions per issue, including some of our content exclusively online (the most common way that our readers access the journal). In addition, we have put out additional calls for submissions and look forward to receiving new work. We have spent the last 4 years working towards social justice, accessibility, global outreach and inclusivity. We have welcomed research and writing from the LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual) and disability com...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Schillace, B. Tags: Editorial Source Type: research
The illness-disease dichotomy and the biological-clinical splitting of medicine
In a recent paper, Sharpe and Greco (2019) argue that some clinical conditions, such as chronic fatigue syndrome (sometimes called myalgic encephalomyelitis), should be treated by altering the patient's experience and response to symptoms without necessarily searching for an underlying cause. As a result, we should allow for the existence of ‘illnesses without (underlying) diseases’. Wilshire and Ward (2019) reply that this possibility requires unwarranted causal assumptions about the psychosocial origins of conditions not predicted by a disease model. In so doing, it is argued that Sharpe and Greco introduce e...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 24, 2021 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tesio, L., Buzzoni, M. Tags: Open access Current controversy Source Type: research
Delirium in intensive care: violence, loss and humanity
This article is derived from a narrative and musical study of the experience of delirium in hospital, undertaken better to understand the perspectives of people who have experienced delirium, as well as the healthcare professionals and family members who care for them. Data were collected in South Africa between 2015 and 2017. The study took the form of interviews and focus groups with a total of 15 participants, as well as periods of observation and audio recording in a hospital intensive care unit. Thematic and narrative analysis of the data were carried out alongside the composition of new music incorporating audio reco...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 24, 2021 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Hume, V. J. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Complexities in interdisciplinary community engagement projects: some reflections and lessons from an applied drama and theatre project in diabetes care
There is a growing interest in using drama techniques and theatrical performance to disseminate health information to lay audiences as part of community engagement projects. This process can be challenging for a number of reasons, however. In this paper, we describe the process and pitfalls of an interdisciplinary project involving the development and performance of a play about diabetes mellitus. The play formed part of a long-term, three-way community engagement project between social science, applied drama and a diabetes clinic in South Africa. Building on a framework derived from a number of applied drama methods, we e...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 24, 2021 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Watermeyer, J., Hume, V. J., Seabi, T., Nattrass, R. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Before compassion: sympathy, tact and the history of the ideal nurse
The word ‘compassion’ is ubiquitous in modern healthcare. Yet few writers agree on what the term means, and what makes it an essential trait in nursing. In this article, I take a historical approach to the problem of understanding compassion. Although many modern writers have assumed that compassion is a universal and unchanging trait, my research reveals that the term is extremely new to healthcare, only becoming widely used in 2009. Of course, even if compassion is a new term in nursing, the concept could have previously existed under another name. I thus consider the emotional qualities associated with the i...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 24, 2021 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Chaney, S. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Understanding the problem of long-term treatment adherence: a phenomenological framework
In light of the large burden of chronic disease and the low rates of long-term treatment adherence contributing to high rates of morbidity and mortality worldwide, this paper contributes to better understanding the particular kind of challenge that living with chronic illness and adhering to long-term treatment can imply. Both literature on the concept of chronic disease and the experience of illness suggest going outside specific diagnostic categories to better understand the problem of adherence. After introducing the distinction of a thin understanding of chronicity—merely as long duration—and a thick one&md...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 24, 2021 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Stutzin Donoso, F. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Ka mura ka muri: understandings of organ donation and transplantation in Aotearoa New Zealand
In this article, we refer to the separation of solid organs from the body as bio-objects. We suggest that the transfer of these bio-objects is connected to emotions and affects that carry a range of different social and cultural meanings specific to the context of Aotearoa New Zealand. The discussion draws on research findings from a series of qualitative indepth interview studies conducted from 2008 to 2013 with Māori (the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand) and Pākehā (European settler New Zealanders) concerning their views on organ donation and transplantation. Our findings show both differen...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 24, 2021 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Shaw, R., Webb, R. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Waiting, strange: transplant recipient experience, medical time and queer/crip temporalities
People who receive a ‘solid’ organ transplant from a deceased person may experience imaginative challenges in making sense of how the transfer impacts their own past and future, as shown in existing scholarship. Building on such work, this article considers how the temporalities of medical encounter itself may also become temporally ambiguous, posing representational challenges both pre-transplantation and post-transplantation. The dominant narrative of transplant in transplantation journals and hospital communications, both clinical and patient-facing, presents surgery as a healing moment, yet the recipient&rs...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 24, 2021 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Wasson, S. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
'That is the skin of my brother: alterity, hybridity and media representations of facial transplantation
In this paper, I explore the 2012 face transplant performed on US recipient Richard Norris and how it was represented by the media as a ‘makeover story’. Informed by press coverage from the date of the transplant to the present day, I examine a widely viewed and critically acclaimed investigative report that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes entitled ‘My Brother’s Keeper’. Through a close reading of both its form and content, I claim that the report’s makeover story consists of four key themes: heroic medicine and miraculous science; appearance-based stigma and social alienation; appearanc...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 24, 2021 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Lafrance, M. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
May I have your uterus? The contribution of considering complexities preceding live uterus transplantation
Uterus transplantation combined with in vitro fertilisation (IVF) (henceforth called UTx-IVF) as a treatment for infertility caused by an absence or malfunction of the uterus is advancing. About 50 transplantations have been conducted worldwide and at least 14 children have been born—9 of them by women taking part in a Swedish research project on UTx-IVF. The Swedish research protocol initially stated that the potential recipient must ‘have her own donor’ who is preferably related to the recipient. But what does it mean to ask someone for a uterus? What challenges does this question instigate? And what no...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 24, 2021 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Guntram, L. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
