'It wasnt what I was suited for: regretful mothers negotiating their reproductive decision and mother role
This study contributes to our understanding of why women without a longing to have children and who, in theory, have the possibility of refraining from parenthood still become mothers. The article is based on in-depth interviews with six Swedish mothers who never longed to have children in the first place. It illustrates how they make sense of their reproductive decision-making process and their current role as a mother. The analysis shows how reproductive decision-making is highly influenced by cultural perceptions of proper womanhood and the idea that every woman has an innate longing to have children, as well as other p...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 22, 2024 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Bodin, M. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
The 'Glasgow effect: the controversial cultural life of a public health term
The question of why more people in Glasgow were dying, and younger, compared with English cities with almost identical levels of deprivation, was a hot topic in Scottish public health debates in the early 21st century. Public health researchers, particularly the Glasgow Centre of Population Health (GCPH), used the terms ‘Glasgow effect’ and ‘Scottish effect’ as placeholders while identifying the unknown factors behind Scotland’s excess mortality. Yet the terms took on a colourful life of their own in the press and larger culture and continue to circulate, despite GCPH’s attempts to retir...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 22, 2024 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Spence, F. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Bearing witness poetically in a pandemic: documenting suffering and care in conditions of physical isolation and uncertainty
The COVID-19 crisis is still affecting millions of people worldwide. However, government and mass media attention to the continuing loss of life, severe illness and prolonged effects of COVID-19 has subsided, rendering the suffering of those who have become ill or disabled, or who have lost loved ones to the disease, largely hidden from view. In this article, we employ autoethnographic poetic inquiry from the perspective of a mother/carer whose young adult daughter became critically ill and hospitalised after becoming infected while the mother herself was isolating at home due to her own COVID-19 diagnosis. The first autho...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 22, 2024 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Boydell, K., Lupton, D. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis: interdisciplinary creative art practice and nature connections
Scoliosis is an abnormal lateral curvature of the spine with the large majority of cases classed as idiopathic, meaning there is no known cause. Typically, most cases occur in children and young people affecting approximately three per cent of the adult populace with five out of six cases being female. The BackBone: Interdisciplinary Creative Practices and Body Positive Resilience pilot research study used arts and humanities methods to measure the impact of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) on well-being and body perception. The research aimed to contribute to a better understanding of alternative treatments towards i...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 22, 2024 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Baker, C., Morris, N., Tsirikos, A., Fotakopoulou, O., Parrott, F. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Illness and (hyper)masculinity in 'HIMM comics from the USA
In this essay, I analyse HIMM comics from the USA, a specific textualisation of graphic medicine/pathography that deals with a variety of illness experiences by male cartoonists. It is my contention that, in the existing literature, the motif of masculinity in autobiographical health-related comics is an underdeveloped area of academic enquiry. As a result, my analysis focuses on how three North American men depict ill health in their work in relation to existing sociological understandings of male behaviour. The texts I discuss are John Porcellino’s The Hospital Suite (2014), a story about his abdominal tumour; Matt...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 22, 2024 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Mitchell, P. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
They are not all wolves: menstruation, young adult fiction and nuancing the teenage boy
Before the 2020 publication of Elana K. Arnold’s Red Hood and Sarah Cuthew’s Blood Moon, Judy Blume’s 1970 novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which ends with the heroine praising God for blessing her with menarche, was one of the only young adult novels to feature menstruation as a central theme. This paper opens with a brief overview of recent English and American menstrual activism and a discussion of scholarly considerations of the menstrual cycle in literature. Then, through a close comparative reading of works by Arnold and Cuthew, I argue that both novels fulfil their feminist agendas...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 22, 2024 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Walton, J. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
"And Then It Spreads": contagion and disease as metaphors of sociomoral contamination in Charles Burns graphic novel Black Hole
This article attempts to demonstrate how Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole (1995) construes the prevalence of contagion and pathological transformation(s) as metaphors of social contamination operating within a biopolitics of segregation. Through a study of plague, infection and strange mutations in Burns’ novel, this article offers a critical evaluation of the monstrous body and investigates how Black Hole portrays the social reception of a sexually contagious virus through conditions of sickness and exclusion, which become biopolitical in quality. It examines, through close reading, how Burns’ nov...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 22, 2024 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Nandi, A., Parui, A. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Creating comics, songs and poems to make sense of decolonising the curriculum: a collaborative autoethnography patchwork
We present this research as a patchwork text of writing, art and conversations. Our work is underpinned by theory, particularly drawing on Sara Ahmed and bell hooks. It is produced by the three of us to illuminate the process of decolonising a curriculum. We see this paper as part of our collective resistance: resistance to colonialism, to scientism and to inhumanity. We hope you will find resonances with your practice, and perhaps discover new ways to find meaning and connections. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - February 22, 2024 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Al-Jawad, M., Chawla, G., Singh, N. Tags: Editor's choice Original research Source Type: research
Social health: rethinking the concept through social practice theory and feminist care ethics
This article theorises social health as an analytical lens for making sense of the relations, affects and events where health unfolds and comes into expression. Drawing on social practice theory, feminist care ethics and posthumanism this conceptual paper re-imagines how social health might be conceived as lived social practices anchored in care. Care within our framework acknowledges the unavoidable interdependency foundational to the existence of beings and stresses the ‘know how’ and embodied practices of care in the mundane in order to emphasise that care itself is absolutely integral to the maintenance of ...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Paul, J., Merz, S., Bergholz, A., König, F., Weigt, J., Eich-Krohm, A., Apfelbacher, C., Holmberg, C. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
UK media responses to HIV through the lens of COVID-19: a study of multidirectional memory
This article proposes correlations and parallels in UK newsprint media coverage of the COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS pandemics through engagement with Michael Rothberg’s model of multidirectional memory. It achieves this via qualitative and quantitative analysis of newsprint media during selected timelines of the respective outbreaks. Although the COVID-19 outbreak, which originated in Wuhan, China in 2019 and spread globally, has prompted reference to a number of previous traumatic events, including 9/11 and the Holocaust, one might contend that it correlates most closely with HIV/AIDS given the latter’s ongoing natur...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Pheasant-Kelly, F. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
The pandemic body: the lived body during the COVID-19 pandemic
In this study, we conduct a detailed analysis of qualitative survey data focusing on adult populations in the UK, Japan and Mexico to address the following question: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed people’s lived experience of their bodies, other people’s bodies and the world? We identify five themes: (i) fear and danger, (ii) bodily doubt and hypervigilance, (iii) risk and trust, (iv) adapting and enduring and (v) changes in perspective. We use two theoretical frameworks: first, Mary Douglas’ anthropological work on purity, risk, danger and symbolism is applied to understand how social and cultural...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Rodrigues, J., Body, K., Carel, H. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
Antibiotics online: digital pharmacy marketplaces and pastiche medicine
The internet enables access to information and the purchasing of medical products of various quality and legality. Research and regulatory attention have focused on the trafficking of illicit substances, potential physical harms of pharmaceuticals, and possibilities like financial fraud. However, there is far less attention paid to antibiotics and other antimicrobials used to treat infections. With online pharmacies affording greater access, caution around antibiotic use is needed due to the increasing health risks of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The COVID-19 pandemic has helped to normalise digital healthcare and conta...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Lyall, B., Smith, A. K. J., Attwell, K., Davis, M. D. M. D. M. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
"It is difficult for us to treat their pain". Health professionals perceptions of Somali pastoralists in the context of pain management: a conceptual model
This study seeks to understand health professionals’ perceptions of Somali pastoralists in the context of pain management in Eastern Ethiopia. Within the scope of this qualitative multicentre study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 health professionals (mainly nurses) experienced in treating Somali pastoralists with pain. Data analysis was based on the coding paradigm proposed by Strauss and Corbin within Grounded Theory methodology and resulted in a conceptual model of pastoralist-specific pain management. We gave voice to pastoralists in the study design, for example, through focus group discussions ...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Baum, E., Abdi, S., van Eeuwijk, P., Probst-Hensch, N., Zinsstag, J., Tschopp, R., Vosseler, B. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Written on milk: exploring messages written on donated human-milk bags
Every so often, among the bags of breast milk sent for donation to milk banks, clear bags of milk are found that are hand decorated and accompanied by short texts written by donating mothers. In the bank labs, the milk is poured into pasteurisation containers, and the bags are thrown away. The milk comes to the neonatal ward packed in bar-coded bottles. Both donor and the recipient are anonymous to one another. To whom are the donating mothers writing their messages? What can be learnt from their writings and drawings about their lived experiences of transitioning into motherhood? In the current study I integrate theoretic...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Oreg, A. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
'Im not hep C free: afterlives of hepatitis C in the era of cure
This article draws on interviews with people who have undergone treatment with direct-acting antivirals (n=30) in Australia to explore the meanings they attach to cure and their experiences of post-cure life. We argue that dominant biomedical understandings of cure as an ‘ending’ and a ‘restoration’ can foreclose insight into the social and other effects of illness that linger after medical cure, and how individuals grapple with those afterlives. Drawing on recent conceptual re-framings of cure from medical anthropology and disability studies, we suggest that thinking at the limits of ‘curativ...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Kagan, D., Seear, K., Lenton, E., Farrugia, A., valentine, k., Mulcahy, S. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
