From danger to destination: changes in the language of endemic disease during the COVID-19 pandemic
At the beginning of 2022, the word ‘endemic’ became a buzzword, especially in the UK and the USA, and a kernel for the formation of novel social representations of the COVID-19 pandemic. The word normally refers to a disease which is continuously present, whose incidence is relatively stable and is maintained at a baseline level in any given locality. Over time, ‘endemic’ migrated from scientific discourse into political discourse, where it was mainly used to argue that the pandemic was over and people now had to learn to ‘live with’ the virus. In this article, we examine the emerging me...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Nerlich, B., Jaspal, R. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
Hanna Rion and The Weekly Dispatchs twilight sleep crusade
The story of twilight sleep is an important, yet neglected, episode in the history of obstetric pain relief in Britain. One reason for its neglect in historical writing is that most of the discussion of the therapy took place in newspapers, particularly the Weekly Dispatch. Using digitised newspapers, as well as medical journals, this article reconstructs the largely overlooked story of twilight sleep in Britain. Twilight sleep was comprised of two drugs, scopolamine and morphine, which acted together to remove the pain of labour, as well as memory of it. Twilight sleep gained popularity in 1915 in Britain, a year after it...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Taylor, E. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
(Post)confessional mode and psychological surveillance in The Crown and Fleabag
Contemporary television’s portrayals of psychotherapy reveal anxieties surrounding surveillance and intimate self-disclosure in clinical and therapeutic settings. This paper analyses two twenty-first century television series featuring therapy sessions that observe and monitor mental states for prognostic purposes, engaging in what Alan Westin terms psychological surveillance: Peter Morgan’s The Crown (2016–2023) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2016–2019). These shows feature contrasting modes of intimate self-disclosure—confessions and postconfessions—that emerge in psychother...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Hagaman, S. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Creative forms: booklets by the hospital senses collective
This article details the creation of a series of booklets designed to explore sensory encounters with hospitals and healthcare environments. The booklets were devised as a series of prompts or provocations, created to attend to and examine embodied, sensory encounters with health/care settings rather than to present research findings. Bringing together an expansive range of backgrounds and skill sets the booklets were created to sit within and beyond language through their design, form and content. Within this article we share the ways in which the works are deliberately unfinished and exploratory as this necessitates that...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Allitt, M., Arnold-Forster, A., Barratt, H., Bates, V., Fleetwood-Smith, R., Hickman, C. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Listening, learning, caring: exploring assemblages of, ethics of and pathways to care for avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID)
Care has been theorised in relationship to eating disorders as a central consideration across diagnoses. In the context of avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) specifically, there is room to further develop the nuances around layers of care involved in working towards well-being. In this paper, we engage with the stories of 14 caregivers of people with ARFID, exploring their pathways to care (or lack thereof) through the healthcare system in Aotearoa New Zealand. We explore the material, affective and relational aspects of care and care-seeking, engaging with the power and politics of care as it flows through ...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: LaMarre, A., McGuigan, K. A., Lewthwaite, M. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Gender, race and class at work: enlisting African health labour into the Gold Coast Medical Service, 1860-1957
This article examines the intersection of race, gender and class in the employment and training of African health labour in the Gold Coast. It argues that European and African gendered ideologies, racial discrimination and class difference influenced the recruitment of Africans into early colonial and missionary medical services. This article is largely based on qualitative research and critical reading and re-reading of textual records. The records include colonial medical reports obtained from the digital archives of the Wellcome Library in London, Manhyia Archives of Ghana, and Public Records and Archives Administration...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tomdi, L. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
What makes a 'good doctor? A critical discourse analysis of perspectives from medical students with lived experience as patients
What constitutes a ‘good doctor’ varies widely across groups and contexts. While patients prioritise communication and empathy, physicians emphasise medical expertise, and medical students describe a combination of the two as professional ideals. We explored the conceptions of the ‘good doctor’ held by medical learners with chronic illnesses or disabilities who self-identify as patients to understand how their learning as both patients and future physicians aligns with existing medical school curricula. We conducted 10 semistructured interviews with medical students with self-reported chronic illnes...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Stergiopoulos, E., Martimianakis, M. A. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Prostheses of disability: Islamic fundamentalism and the disabled body in postcolonial Arab fiction
This essay focuses on the representational relationship between disability and Islamic fundamentalism in select contemporary postcolonial literary texts by Arab authors. The essay draws mainly on critical disability theory on the concept of prosthesis to argue that disability functions as a narrative and emotional prosthesis to narratives on Islamic fundamentalism at the same time as it lays bare this very process of instrumentalisation. To this end the essay asks: What are the privileged affects that attach themselves to representations of disability in fictions of Islamic fundamentalism? How do textual and affective pros...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Hamdar, A. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Cripping the pain scale: literary and biomedical narratives of pain assessment
This article analyses the literary representation of pain scales and assessment in two chronic pain narratives: ‘The Pain Scale’, a lyric essay by Eula Biss, and essays from Sonya Huber’s collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System. Establishing first a brief history of methods attempting to quantify pain before my close reading, I read both Biss’ and Huber’s accounts as performative explorations of the limitations of using linear pain scales for pain which is recursive and enduring. Considering both texts as cripistemologies of chronic pain, my literary analy...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Mellor, N. Tags: Editor's choice Original research Source Type: research
Narrative-based learning for person-centred healthcare: the Caring Stories learning framework
This paper describes the learning framework for an innovative narrative-based training platform for healthcare professionals based on older patients’ narratives. The aim of Caring Stories is to place patients’ desires and needs at the heart of healthcare and by doing so to promote person-centred care (PCC). It is argued that this narrative-based approach to training in healthcare education will provide professionals from different fields with competencies to better understand how to interpret the lifeworlds of older people, as well as facilitate better communication and navigation through increasingly complex c...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Mazzoli Smith, L., Villar, F., Wendel, S. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Effect of a long-term art-based group therapy with eating disorders
This study examined the effects of ABGT on disease symptoms, difficulty regulating emotions, depression, anxiety, targeted problems, functioning of individuals with EDs and therapeutic efficiency of the group. The study was carried out as a pre-test-post-test, quasi-experimental study with a control group, with a small sample diagnosed with an ED. In addition to their standard treatment at the outpatient centre, participants were included in a 30-week long-term semistructured ABGT focused on raising awareness of their psychological problems. Participants who received ABGT had significantly better functioning and lower seve...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Eren, N., Tunc, P., Yücel, B. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Authority and medical expertise: Arthur Conan Doyle in The Idler
Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical and writing careers intertwined and his work has a history of being read in the light of his medical expertise. He wrote at a time when the professionalisation and specialisation of medicine had resulted in an increasing distance between the profession and the public, yet general practitioners relied financially on maintaining good relationships with their patients and popular medical journalism proliferated. A variety of contrasting voices often disseminated narratives of medical science. These conflicting developments raised questions of authority and expertise in relation to the constr...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Chapman, A. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Time to treat the climate and nature crisis as one indivisible global health emergency
Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations (UN), political leaders and health professionals to recognise that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackled together to preserve health and avoid catastrophe. This overall environmental crisis is now so severe as to be a global health emergency. The world is currently responding to the climate crisis and the nature crisis as if they were separate challenges. This is a dangerous mistake. The 28th Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate change is about to be held in Dubai while the 16th COP on biodiversity is due to be held in T...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Zielinski, C., on behalf of the authorship group listed below Tags: Open access Editorial Source Type: research
Forensic rhetoric: COVID-19, the forum and the boundaries of healthcare evidence
This article investigates the rhetoric of those presentations as a phenomenon indicating both the commitment to evidence-based public health messaging and its political loading in three interlinked case studies: computer-generated imagery ; ‘podium’ presentation and the NSO Fleming leak of COVID-19 contact tracing data. The pandemic has seen healthcare evidence attain ever-greater visibility in public forums, and those forums have themselves undergone rapid transformation. ‘Podium’ presentations such as press conferences have featured colourful imagery, and the manifold visualisations of SARS-CoV-2 ...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Jones, D. H. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
Does medical humanities matter? The challenge of COVID-19
Medical humanities has tended first and foremost to be associated with the ways in which the arts and humanities help us to understand health. However, this is not the only or necessarily the primary aim of our field. What the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed above all is what the field of critical medical humanities has insisted on: the deep entanglement of social, cultural, historical life with the biomedical. The pandemic has been a time for reinstating the power of expertise of a particular kind, focusing on epidemiology, scientific modelling of potential outcomes and vaccine development. All of this delivered by science...
Source: Medical Humanities - December 19, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Macnaughton, J. Tags: Open access, COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
