Correction: Digital hermeneutics: scaled readings of online depression discourses
van de Ven I, van Nuenen T. Digital hermeneutics: scaled readings of online depression discourses. Med Humanit 2022;48:335–346. doi:10.1136/medhum-2020-012104
The funding statement has been updated in the online HTML and PDF. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Tags: Open access Correction Source Type: research
White supremacy culture and the assimilation trauma of medical training: ungaslighting the physician burnout discourse
The physician burnout discourse emphasises organisational challenges and personal well-being as primary points of intervention. However, these foci have minimally impacted this worsening public health crisis by failing to address the primary sources of harm: oppression. Organised medicine’s whiteness, developed and sustained since the nineteenth century, has moulded training and clinical practice, favouring those who embody its oppressive ideals while punishing those who do not. Here, we reframe physician burnout as the trauma resulting from the forced assimilation into whiteness and the white supremacy culture embed...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Legha, R. K., Martinek, N. N. Tags: Current controversy Source Type: research
Indigenous history in health education
Integrating Indigenous history in medical education prepares future providers to better understand and critique their practice, their patient collaborators and the causes and consequences of disease. Indigenous history offers students ready access to practise cultural humility and develop facility with diverse medical epistemologies. Furthermore, as providers who will practise in a world characterised by a climate catastrophe and its manifold health consequences, Indigenous history is critical for contextualising the climate crisis, the manifold contemporary responses and avenues towards reckoning and redress. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Flood, M. Tags: Current controversy Source Type: research
Evolution in Health and Medical Humanities education: a proposal for accreditation
The growth of Health and Medical Humanities baccalaureate and master’s degrees in recent decades makes the present moment ideal for initiating field-defining conversations among health humanities constituents about the boundaries of this transdisciplinary field. Focusing on accreditation at the programme level rather than the individual level, we explore four models with different advantages for Health and Medical Humanities: a certification for practice; a network (umbrella organisation); a programme of merit (POM) model; and consultancy. We conclude that for a young field like health humanities that is transdiscipl...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Berry, S. L., Williams, A.-l., Lamb, E. G., Klugman, C. M. Tags: Current controversy Source Type: research
The COVID-19 vaccine patent: a right without rationale
This article addresses the waiver controversy. Following a critical review of both dimensions of the controversy, the article concentrates on the extent to which the waiver application contradicts the theoretical justification of the patent system. It concludes that the concerns raised over the conflict between the waiver proposal and the patent right philosophy are indefensible. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Althabhawi, N. M., Kashef Al-Ghetaa, A. A. Tags: COVID-19 Current controversy Source Type: research
Crip the elders and get out of white privilege free
The question of identity positioning in relation to engagement with issues of social exclusion is complex. I am a white non-disabled South African man working on disability and care issues. I reflect on my representation of my parents, through memoirs and of Elsa Joubert, a doyenne of African writing. My depiction of these people as profoundly affected by disability and illness provides me as a privileged white scholar a way of marking my difference from stereotypical oppressive positioning. Though my rhetorical manoeuvres do not undercut the intention of my work, they point to broader, difficult questions about positionin...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Swartz, L. Tags: Editor's choice Original research Source Type: research
Somewhere out there in a place no one knows: Yoko Ogawas The Memory Police and the literature of forgetting
Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police was published in Japanese in 1994. Since the release of its first English translation in 2019, the text has attracted a handful of responses from English literary scholars. Most of these focus on the novel’s allegorical potential in relation to issues of totalitarianism and collectively enforced memory loss—as evocative, for example, of the Orwellian dystopia, or the state silencing of radiation victims in Japan. Ogawa’s text depicts inhabitants of an unnamed island as they suffer a series of ‘disappearances’. At the same time on arbitrary days, they forget...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Henning, J. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Making space for disability studies within a structurally competent medical curriculum: reflections on long Covid
This article argues that the integration of thinking from disability studies into medical curricula offers a pathway to such understanding, informing a more equitable, holistic and patient-centred approach to practice. Further, a structurally competent, antiableist approach positions clinicians and patients as allies, working together within a structural context that constrains both parties. Such positioning may mitigate tensions within the clinical encounter, tensions that are well documented in the realm of marginalised chronic illness and disability. While the possibilities arising from a partnership between disability ...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Hunt, J. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
Bubbles and lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand: the language of self-isolation in #Covid19NZ tweets
In March 2020, as cases of COVID-19 were found in Aotearoa New Zealand, the government moved to eliminate community transmission of the virus through self-isolation. During this month, as the population discussed if, when and how households would be asked to stay at home, terms such as lockdown—the state of (national) closure—and bubble—the household isolating together—became common parts of everyday conversation.
In this article, we blend quantitative and qualitative research methodologies from corpus linguistics, literary studies and the medical humanities to compare the affective range of the ter...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Burnette, J., Long, M. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
'In the picture: perspectives on living and working with cancer
We explored working and living with cancer at a large research-intensive National Health Service hospital breast cancer service and adjoining non-governmental organisation (NGO). The project had three elements that were largely autonomous in practice but conceptually integrated through a focus on personalised cancer medicine. Di Sherlock held conversations with staff and patients from which she produced a collection of poems, Written Portraits. At the same time, we conducted interviews and observation in the hospital, and hosted a public series of science cafés in the NGO. The trajectory of this project was not pred...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Day, S., Gleason, K., Lury, C., Sherlock, D., Viney, W., Ward, H. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
The Jews penis: circumcision and sexual pathology in eighteenth-century England
This essay explores the contradictory, prejudicial attitudes towards circumcision and Jewish male sexuality circulating in eighteenth-century English print culture. I argue that while Jewish men had long been accused of lustfulness, effeminacy and sexual deviance, eighteenth-century culture added to these concerns a unique interest in sexual pathology, borne in part from the growing medical anxiety around venereal disease. Consequently, while Jewish men were still widely condemned for their lechery, they were also increasingly ridiculed for a range of penile and sexual disorders that were believed to make sex unsatisfying,...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Gallagher, N. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Perplexity as a provocation: revisiting the role of metaphor as a 'place holder for the potential of COVID-19 antibodies
This article revisits long-standing critiques of the role of metaphor in immunological discourse. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy of organism, I focus on the use of metaphor to explain the process by which COVID-19 vaccine research is able to generate protective antibodies, the challenge of autoimmune disease and dengue fever antibodies. I suggest that metaphors are provoked by the perplexity that arises from presupposing that distinct morphological substances are the first order of reality. I conclude that rather than seeing metaphors as typically skewing conceptions of the body, as has be...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Rosengarten, M. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
Of not passing: homelessness, addiction, mental health and care during COVID-19
People experiencing homelessness in the UK were unconditionally offered housing (and support) from the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020. For many, that meant ‘(re)entering’ the support system and having a chance to ‘move on’ to longer-term housing. This beneficial effect of some of the policy reactions to the pandemic on people experiencing homelessness was unexpected. On the flip side, however, particularly for people struggling with drug use and mental health issues, adequate support was not available for long periods of time; support was either suspended temporarily or people were ex...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Lenhard, J., Margetts, M., Meng, E. Tags: Open access, COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
The freighted social histories of HIV and hepatitis C: exploring service providers perspectives on stigma in the current epidemics
This article is based on a study of the experiences of serodiscordance, or mixed infection status, in families living with HIV and two types of viral hepatitis, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. The article explores the perspectives of healthcare workers who work with people affected by these viruses, who were asked about their experiences in working with serodiscordance in families. Interviews revealed that changing social meanings given to bloodborne viruses, and changes to treatment over time, held a significant place in the accounts that service providers gave of their work. In asking them to describe their work with HIV an...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: valentine, k., Smith, A. K. J., Persson, A., Gray, R., Bryant, J., Hamilton, M., Wallace, J., Drysdale, K., Newman, C. E. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Broadening and deepening the understanding of agency in dementia
Agency has become an essential component of discussions concerning selfhood, well-being, and care in dementia studies but the concept itself is rarely clearly defined and the use of this term can be confusing and conflicting. This paper outlines some of the key ways in which agency has been conceptualised in relation to dementia, highlighting the complexities surrounding this concept and focusing on agency in a way that is tied to our ideas about citizenship, legal and human rights. Seven key dimensions of agency are examined: embodiment, emotions, sense of agency, intentional conscious action, the social context of agency...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: van der Byl Williams, M., Zeilig, H. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
