Race, class, caste, disability, sterilisation and hysterectomy
This interdisciplinary historical paper focuses on the past and current state of diverse forms of surgical hysterectomy as a global phenomenon relating to population control and sterilisation. It is a paper grounded in historical inquiry but is unconventional relative to the norms of historical scholarship both in its wide geographical scope informed by the methodologies of global and intercultural history, in its critique of current clinical practices informed by recent feminist, race, biopolitical and disability studies, and by its engagement with scholarship in health sociology and medical anthropology which has focused...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Downham Moore, A. M. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
(De)troubling transparency: artificial intelligence (AI) for clinical applications
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques occupy a prominent role in medical research in terms of the innovation and development of new technologies. However, while many perceive AI as a technology of promise and hope—one that is allowing for more early and accurate diagnosis—the acceptance of AI and ML technologies in hospitals remains low. A major reason for this is the lack of transparency associated with these technologies, in particular epistemic transparency, which results in AI disturbing or troubling established knowledge practices in clinical contexts. In this article, we descri...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Winter, P. D., Carusi, A. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Finding more constructive ways forward in the debate over vaccines with increased disability cultural competence
The aim of this article is to study the discursive construction of disability that takes place in the vaccine-autism controversy from the 1990s to 2000s, and an attempt to develop a more holistic framework to understand vaccine decisions and their motivations. It is argued that the debate over vaccines produces knowledge and meanings about disability, and that the vaccine-autism controversy is kept alive largely because of how it reproduces stigmatising accounts of disability and autism. The suggestion is that if the stigmatising elements of disability were removed in the debate over vaccines, there would be no controversy...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Ahlvik-Harju, C. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Chronicling the chronic: narrating the meaninglessness of chronic pain
This article proposes a way of narrating chronic pain: the telling of a chronicle. Recent work in the medical humanities has been critical of traditional approaches to illness narratives. In line with this criticism, we argue that the experience of chronic pain resists internally coherent, plot-driven—in other words, Aristotelian—narrative. Drawing on phenomenological studies, we state that chronic pain is an utterly meaningless experience due to its relentless continuation over time. It therefore defies any narrative search for a higher meaning or purpose as well as the search for a coherent and progressive &l...
Source: Medical Humanities - February 21, 2023 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: van Hout, F., van Rooden, A., Slatman, J. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Historiographies of surgical innovation: endoscopic endonasal pituitary surgery
The historiography of medicine has shifted from narratives of inevitable progress, authored mainly by the medical profession, to a more complex, analytical approach in which historians place medicine in its social context. However, the history of surgery has lagged behind somewhat; Christopher Lawrence suggests this is because the recent focus on the construction of medical knowledge does not incorporate the practical aspects of surgery, which are difficult to extract from their previous linear narrative. Thomas Schlich likewise recognises that surgery is both knowledge and skill—therefore more of a ‘craft&rsqu...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Conroy, K. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Unburdening expectation and operating between: architecture in support of palliative care
The role of design and materials in the enactment and experience of healthcare has gained increasing attention across the fields of evidence-based design, architecture, anthropology, sociology and cultural geography. Evidence-based design, specifically, seeks to understand the ways in which the built environment can support the healing process. In the context of palliative care, however, the very measure of healing differs vastly. Physicians Mount and Kearney suggest that ‘it is possible to die healed’, and that such healing can be facilitated through the provision of ‘a secure environment grounded in a s...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Mclaughlan, R., George, B. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
The transition from abortion to miscarriage to describe early pregnancy loss in British medical journals: a prescribed or natural lexical change?
In British medical research, the transition from abortion to miscarriage, to describe early pregnancy loss, occurred in the late twentieth century. A 1985 letter to The Lancet by a group of eminent obstetricians was long considered unilaterally to have prompted this shift. More recently, however, this conclusion was challenged, and it was suggested instead that the transition constituted natural language change, as medical professionals responded to their changing social and professional milieu. This paper, however, uses a pioneering statistical modelling technique to demonstrate decisively that the 1985 Lancet letter was ...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Malory, B. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Aesthetics for everyday quality: one way to enrich healthcare improvement debates
In this paper we seek to illuminate the importance of aesthetics for healthcare quality and encourage more explicit discussion of aesthetics in healthcare improvement scholarship and practice. We hope to contribute to and help develop the hinterland between arts-based initiatives in healthcare and the ‘normal business’ of healthcare quality improvement. Our broad contention is: (1) That aesthetic considerations should be seen as of universal relevance across quality debates (2) That they never be assumed to have a marginal or even secondary status; and (3) That taking aesthetic considerations seriously calls fo...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Cribb, A., Pullin, G. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Biopower under a state of exception: stories of dying and grieving alone during COVID-19 emergency measures
During the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions for visitors and caregivers in healthcare settings and long-term care (LTC) facilities were enacted in the larger context of public health policies that included physical distancing and shelter-in-place orders. Older persons residing in LTC facilities constituted over half of the mortality statistics across Canada during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the poststructuralist work of Agamben, Foucault and Mbembe we conducted a thematic analysis on news reports. The extracts of media stories presented in our paper suggest that the scholarship on (bio)power and necropol...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Rangel, J. C., Holmes, D., Perron, A., Miller, G. E. Tags: COVID-19 Original research Source Type: research
Beyond 'born not made: challenging character, emotions and professionalism in undergraduate medical education
In this article we explore the historical antecedents and ongoing perpetuation of the idea that medical professionals must adhere to a specific ‘character’. In the late nineteenth century, an ideal of the medical student as ‘born not made’ was substantiated through medical school opening addresses and other medical literature. An understanding prevailed that students would have a natural inclination that would suit them to medical work, which was predicated on class structures. As we move into the twentieth-century context, we see that such underpinnings remained, even if the idea of ‘characte...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Allitt, M., Frampton, S. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
After the madhouses: the emotional politics of psychiatry and community care in the UK tabloid press 1980-1995
This article examines the reaction to the passing of the Act in two major tabloid presses, The Sun and The Daily Mirror, in order to reveal how community care changed the emotional terrain of tabloid storytelling on mental health. Reviewing an archive of 15 years of tabloid reporting on mental illness, I argue that the generation of ‘objects of feeling’ in the tabloid media is dependent on the availability of recognisable and stable symbols. Tabloid reporting of mental illness before 1990 reveals the dominance of the image of the asylum in popular understandings of mental illness. Here the asylum is used to gen...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Sidi, L. Tags: Open access Original research Source Type: research
Guilt, shame and negative emotion in undergraduate medical education: is there a role for Balint groups?
Balint groups are a structured discussion which explores non-clinical aspects of the doctor–patient relationship. In this commentary piece we describe our experience of a Balint group for final-year medical students in a large regional hospital. We discuss that our participants reported a significant burden of negative emotion, primarily guilt and shame, in attempting to navigate the hospital environment as learners. We note how our participants perceived they would acquire the ability to manage these negative emotions simply by becoming doctors, despite being only a few months from qualification. A cultural shift in...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Greenlees, G., Archer, L. Tags: Commentary Source Type: research
Conceptualisations of care: why understanding paid care is important
Within social policy, the question of what constitutes ‘care’ within the care industry is ill-defined, leading to problematic assumptions that conflate paid and unpaid care. This paper draws on my own experiences of working in the care industry, and data collected during a 4-month ethnography in a Domiciliary Care company. Analysis of these data indicates that three differing conceptualisations of care are influential within the setting: business, medical/professional and familial. These conceptualisations are not discrete, and their interconnections are evident both in the literature and the data. Although the...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Harrison, R. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
Collecting affect: emotion and empathy in World War II photographs and drawings of plastic surgery
This article compares drawings by Diana ‘Dickie’ Orpen (1914–2008) with photographs by Percy Hennell (1911–1987); both of their oeuvres depict plastic reconstructive surgeries from World War II in Britain. Through visual analysis, personal experience and interviews with archivists who have worked with the collections, this article aims to determine the affective effects of these drawings and photographs. I argue that Hennell’s images are the more affective and subjective objects, even though their original purpose was objective and scientific. This article asks why Hennell’s photographs ...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Slobogin, C. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
'Written of by novelists: scripting and managing emotions in 19th-century medical manuscripts
This article frames the bedside as a theatre of emotions, in which Holder’s performance and management of his emotions was key to his professional identity. His literary interests thus provided him with two tools: first, literature provided him with models for how to respond to and record different kinds of medical encounters, particularly deaths, near-death experiences and childbirth; second, his mode of keeping these records, which included the production of poetry as well as medical prose, served as a technology of coping, further allowing him to manage his emotions by exorcising them on the page. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Thompson, C. E. Tags: Original research Source Type: research
