Virtuosic craft or clerical labour: the rise of the electronic health record and challenges to physicians professional identity (1950-2022)
The electronic health record (EHR) is a focus of contentious debate, having become as essential to contemporary clinical practice as it is polarising. Debates about the EHR raise questions about physicians’ professional identity, the nature of clinical work, evolution of the patient/practitioner relationship, and narratives of technological optimism and pessimism. The metaphors by which clinicians stake our identities—are we historians, detectives, educators, technicians, or something else?—animate the history of the early computer-based medical record in the mid-to-late twentieth-century USA. Proponents ...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Krishnan, L., Neuss, M. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Commentary on 'Somewhere out there in a place no one knows: Yoko Ogawas The Memory Police and the literature of forgetting by John Henning
The Memory Police is a disconcerting novel set on a mysterious island. Inhabitants of this island suffer objects being ‘disappeared’, and we follow our narrator’s journey as they try to navigate these disappearances. Henning in their compelling recent essay suggests that the novel can be more fully appreciated by engaging with a literature of forgetting and draws parallels between the events in the book and the course of the neurodegenerative process of Alzheimer’s disease. In this commentary, I suggest that the progressive deterioration of conceptual knowledge described in the novel most closely re...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Hardy, C. J. D. Tags: Commentary Source Type: research
Mutant metaphors: Frankenstein in the era of COVID-19
Since its debut, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has, fittingly, assumed a life of its own. In today’s cultural landscape, the mere mention of ‘mutant’ evokes the language of Othering, including Frankensteinian metaphors, such as those used to describe the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. When scientists referred to omicron as a Frankenstein variant, they demonstrated the inherent mutability of the myth—a myth that is crucial in biomedicine. In this article, the authors examine the shifting nature of Frankenstein metaphors and consider how they function in what Priscilla Wald refers to as outbreak n...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Coffelt, A., Djandji, A. Tags: Open access, COVID-19 Current controversy Source Type: research
Choosing the best apple: counselling leaflets and technologies of communication in the history of reproduction
Historians have shown how the establishment of human genetic counselling in West Germany was characterised by several sociohistorical factors, in particular the impact of the legacies of Nazi biopolitics. These accounts have reconstructed continuities on an intellectual level which delayed a turn towards non-directive approaches, emphasising individual (emotional) well-being and voluntariness, and instead have prolonged a discourse that defined disability as an economic and social burden. However, while the distinct legacies of eugenics and racial hygienics are well researched, other factors that constituted counselling en...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Nemec, B. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Making the 'genetic counsellor in the UK, 1980-1995
The professional identity of the ‘genetic counsellor’ first took shape in the UK in the early 1990s, when the University of Manchester established the country’s first masters-level training course. Postwar, genetic counselling had been carried out by (male) clinical geneticists, who, alongside their research, clinical and field-building activities, met patients and families to discuss inherited conditions and risk estimates, and who sometimes advised parents whether to attempt or continue pregnancies. By contrast, the new cohort of students in Manchester in the 1990s were not medically trained, were mostl...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Bangham, J. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Healthy, happy, rational: reflections on genetic counselling in the GDR
The development of genetic counselling in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was closely connected to a well-established system of prenatal care and a process that placed reproductive decisions in the hands of women. It was embedded in the pronatalist reproductive policy of the GDR and a narrative of medical and (socialist) humanistic progress. As in other countries at that time, it promoted the goal of avoiding the birth of children with disabilities and was hence based on ableist premises. In this paper, I focus on communicative aspects of genetic counselling, as it was established in the 1970s and 1980s in university ...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Doetz, S. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Obedient mothers, healthy children: communication on the risks of reproduction in state-socialist Czechoslovakia
The article analyses medical communication in popular media relating to the risks in reproduction in the state-socialist Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989 and shows how it used emotions as an instrument to control women’s reproductive behaviour. In particular, we use an approach inspired by Donati’s (1992) political discourse analysis and by Snow and Bedford’s (1988) framing analysis to explore communication on the risk of infertility in the abortion debate, the risk of fetal abnormalities in the prenatal screening debate, and the risk of emotional deprivation and morbidity in infants in the debate on ...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Dudova, R., Haskova, H. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Peer-to-peer counselling and emotional guidance on infertility in Britain and Belgium (1970s-1980s)
In the wake of sexual and reproductive health counselling in postwar Western Europe, emotional guidance on infertility was as yet neither readily recognised nor available. In this article, we show that in Britain and Belgium, infertile couples themselves identified the need for systematic emotional guidance on their infertility experiences. They set up self-help support groups to provide counselling on infertility in their respective countries. Originally formed by heterosexual, white, middle-class couples, who were childless due to infertility, these support groups were cautious—rather than affirmative—of repr...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Hilevych, Y., Claes, T. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Sex, relationships and 'everyday psychology on British magazine problem pages, c. 1960-1990
This article uses women’s magazine problem pages, exploring the role of advice columnists on and off the page, to examine the intersections of "permissiveness" and the psychologisation of everyday life. Millions looked to agony aunts in mass-market women’s magazines to help them negotiate new emotional and sexual worlds. As purveyors of counsel, but not (usually) formally trained counsellors, magazine advisors worked with the new languages and concepts of psychological expertise and disseminated them to avid readers.
Across this period, problem pages demonstrated greater openness towards sex and displacement of...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Loughran, T. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
'Please help me, I am so miserable!: sexual health, emotions and counselling in teen and young adult problem pages in late 1980s Ireland
In 1984, the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) established a youth group comprised of young volunteers aged between 16 years and 20 years. The IFPA was responding to a perceived need for sexual health advice for young people in the absence of any formal sex education in Irish schools. The group established a telephone helpline and, from late 1987, was commissioned to provide advice columns for two Irish magazines for young people called Hot Press and Fresh. The advice columns run by the IFPA youth group provided an important educational and counselling service for young people on matters relating to sexual health an...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Kelly, L. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Counselling for connection: making queer relationships during Britains sexual revolution
This article examines the creation and mobilisation of counselling services by British LGBTQ+ activist organisations during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on Britain’s first ‘homophile’ organisation, the Albany Trust, and Friend, the counselling and peer support wing of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (1975). Beginning in the early 1960s, activists supporting homosexual law reform launched counselling services aimed at sexual minorities as a long-term solution to the harmful and enduring legacy of social exclusion and internalised homophobia and transphobia in Britain (and beyond). In an ef...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Chettiar, T. Tags: Editor's choice Original research Source Type: research
Sparing the doctors blushes: the use of sexually explicit films for the purpose of Sexual Attitude Reassessment (SAR) in the training of medical practitioners in Britain during the 1970s
The general reluctance of medical practitioners in postwar Britain to ‘speak of sex’ during healthcare consultations increasingly became a matter of professional concern in the wake of legal reforms and social changes during the 1960s affecting sexual expression and reproductive health, and a growing optimism in the early 1970s concerning the treatment of sexual difficulties. In the mid-1970s, largely as a result of the work of Dr Elizabeth Stanley, Sexual Attitude Reassessment (SAR) seminars were introduced from the USA into some medical schools in Britain, usually as a part of courses that were intended to he...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Irwin, R. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Contact building: emotional exchanges between counsellees and counsellors in the late socialist period in Poland
This article focuses on Wiesław Sokoluk, one of the key Polish youth counsellors and sex educators active during the late socialist period (the 1970s and 1980s), looking at his path to becoming a sex educator and youth counsellor as well as his practice in both fields. It treats his story as a case study that illustrates the distinctive development of the related disciplines of sex counselling and education. It specifically focuses on the communication between Sokoluk and his counsellees, school pupils, correspondents and readership. It shows how the distinctive methods underpinning emotion-driven communication betw...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Koscianska, A. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
"If we can show that we are helping adolescents to understand themselves, their feelings and their needs, then we are doing [a] valuable job": counselling young people on sexual health in the Brook Advisory Centre (1965-1985)
First opened in 1964 in London, the Brook Advisory Centres (BAC) were the first centres to provide contraceptive advice and sexual counselling to unmarried people in postwar Britain. Drawing on archival materials, medical articles published by BAC members and oral history interviews with former counsellors, this paper looks at tensions present in sexual health counselling work between progressive views on young people’s sexuality and moral conservatism. In so doing, this paper makes two inter-related arguments. First, I argue that BAC doctors, counsellors and social workers simultaneously tried to adopt a non-judgmen...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Rusterholz, C. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Talking about sexual and reproductive health: counselling encounters in postwar Europe
Communication and counselling are at the heart of the vast web of institutions and practices that comprise sexual and reproductive health. Learning test results, making decisions about treatment and birth control, working through difficult emotions, grappling with personal and cultural expectations—these are experiences that powerfully impact individuals, families, communities and (as some would have it) nations. They are also often mediated through counselling with professionals and peers. Over several decades, sexual and reproductive counselling encounters have been studied and theorised, and their practitioners ha...
Source: Medical Humanities - July 11, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Bangham, J., Hilevych, Y., Rusterholz, C. Tags: Editorial Source Type: research
