Neni Panourgiá // From the Politics of Theory to the Brutality of Practice If there ever was a time when the theory of Medical Humanities could be tested, that time came slithering on December 31, 2019. As the world was celebrating the arrival of a new year, hoping to leave the horrors of 2019 behind,…
Teenagers connecting with their babies
Sasheenie Moodley // In this article, I explore what happens to teenage mothers – and the way they live their lives – after their babies are born. This article follows one of my earlier pieces in Synapsis titled “Teenage mother love.” Here, I argue that there is another dimension of teenage mothering that complements ‘mother…
Synthetic Life: Anatomy, Paternity, and Personhood in Star Trek: Picard
Rebecca M. Rosen // What truly constitutes a person—their consciousness or their anatomy? Who determines “real” personhood, and how much does biological human(oid) anatomy have to do with that? Which is all to say, what is a person, and who can call themselves “real”? These are the questions viewers are prompted to address in Star…
A first time teaching African medical crisis from afar: Uncomfortable global north-south juxtapositions
Renée van der Wiel // I have been in the global north, what is for me a relatively exotic place, while designing a social anthropology course. The course is about healthcare professionals and institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. In the past I taught students in my home city, Johannesburg, in buildings literally only a few kilometers…
Death Wish: Caring for the Dead and Dying in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
Timothy Kent Holliday // “Dying is an art, like everything else” (Plath 245). With these words twentieth-century poet Sylvia Plath alluded to her own suicidal ideation. Death wishes of a different kind entwined in cities like Philadelphia in the 1830s, a century before Plath’s birth: the dying dreams of a patient, and the nineteenth-century anatomist’s…
The Case for the Country Doctor
Scott C. Thompson // The nineteenth-century “country doctor”—making community house calls, accepting direct and indirect payments, treating patients with a limited range of pharmaceutical and technological options—is a paradoxical figure in Victorian fiction.[1] While perceived as disconnected from the cutting edge of Western scientific and medical research taking place in urban centers (such as London,…
Brave New World: Cyberpunk 2077’s novel depiction of mental illness
Steve Server // By now, many have heard of Cyberpunk 2077, even those not normally within the gamer-orbit. The early rollout of the game has been plagued by game-breaking glitches and unexpectedly poor graphics and performance. Beyond the controversial rollout—and underneath the typical blood and guts associated with violent role-playing games—Cyberpunk 2077 has something unique to say about mental…
Inadequate Shielding
Kate Bolton Bonnici // Inside the room someone breathes through a machine until at some point they will be moved to a smaller room & there will be no breathing machine & breathing will end in some version or another. (You get that this is code for what you don’t know how to say.) Outside…
Roundtable: Medical Humanities and Visual Culture (Part I)
Editor’s note: This two-part roundtable features critiques of contemporary visual culture as seen through a medical humanist lens. In Part I, below, Laila Knio and Alyson Lee draw on the scholarship of sociologist Arthur Frank to interpret how pharmaceutical advertising depicted mental illness among Black Americans in the 1970s and plastic surgery for young South…
Roundtable: Medical Humanities and Visual Culture (Part II)
Editor’s note: This two-part roundtable features critiques of contemporary visual culture as seen through a medical humanist lens. Part I drew on research in sociology to interpret pharmaceutical advertising. In Part II, below, Leah Rosen and Lilli Schussler tackle questions of the reproduction and extension of human life: Rosen in the context of 1930s popular…
Book Review: Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-century India.
Yaming You // David Arnold’s Colonizing the Body sketches the history of British colonial policy of public health in India in the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 talks about how the medico-topographical reports produced by British professionals in India orientalized India’s tropical environment, which according to the then popular miasmatic theory of etiology, caused many of…
