Dear Readers, Thank you! Editing, producing, designing (and reading!) this journal has been exceptionally gratifying. We are thankful for the bright and bold writers who each week step out of the confines of their traditional disciplines. We are thankful for being introduced to new ideas, artistic works and academic texts. And we are thankful for…
Ancient Medicine, Future Bodies
Calloway Scott // I want to make a case for looking back to the Corpus Hippocraticum—the Hippocratic Corpus—as a valuable site for thinking about the medical humanities and its future. The 60 odd medical treatises which make up the Corpus are really the works of many hands working at different times and places over the course…
Embodied Post-colonialism — Part 1
Sneha Mantri // If you pick up your favorite world literature anthology and turn to the table of contents, you’ll notice immediately that the authors are categorized with startling precision. “Here,” the editors seem to say, “are the British writers, and in this corner we have the Africans—an entire continent’s worth! — and we’ve also…
Immigrant Organizing for Care in the Territory of Hawai’i: The Chinese Old Men’s Home
Julia Katz // How do non-citizens lobby the states and societies that exclude them for greater investment in the welfare of their communities? The case of the Chinese in post-annexation Hawai‘i reveals a unique moment in the midst of global Progressive reform when racialized migrants ineligible for citizenship mobilized claims of economic exceptionalism and autonomous care…
From the Dental Parlors: Dentistry and Masculinity in Frank Norris’s “McTeague”
John Carranza // In his introduction to Frank Norris’s turn of the century novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, Eric Solomon poses the question, “Still, a novel about a dentist?”[1] In response to this question, Solomon cites Norris’s desire to have a main character that had not yet been written about. In many ways,…
Seeking Purity: Essential Oils and White Motherhood
Emilie Egger // Last summer at a conference on organic farming, I took a “weedwifery” walk with a longtime herbalist. Near the end of the hour-long event, during which the herbalist pointed out the extensive health uses of commonplace plants that usually become subject to removal when they appear in people’s gardens, another conversation emerged….
The Pump Handle, Fire Hydrants, Grapes: Health Care Metaphors in Negative Spaces
Chuka Nestor Emezue // Broad Street. West London. Summer of 1854. Wrought with a bad case of speaking anxieties, and once voted “Orator of the Year” by the Medical Society of London, Dr. John Snow confronts the Medical Council. Failing to sway his medical counterparts about the causal link of Cholera– through a not-so-elaborate fecal-oral…
Notes from the Frontline: When Death Becomes Routine (Part 1)
David Thomas Peacock // I wasn’t prepared for so much death. Before I became an emergency room nurse, I worked on a neurology unit with stroke patients. I loved that job. I gained a lot of clinical knowledge from my colleagues, but I learned even more about what it means to be a human faced…
Translating Medicine: Interview with Harris Solomon, author of Metabolic Living
Roanne Kantor // Q: What does medicine mean to you? How does it relate to your projects (past or current), and the academic position you hold? A: For me, medicine is most meaningful on a several fronts right now, in light of my current ethnographic research in and around casualty (emergency) and trauma wards at…
On Regeneration: The Once and Future Embryo
Mia Florin-Sefton // I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing . . . we require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender – Donna Haraway…
Brain Power: Intelligence in the Age of Neuroscience
Ittai Orr // When I set out to take the LSAT, the law school admissions test, I believed it was an IQ test that would finally lay bare the limits of my inherent brain power. According to the organization that administers the exam, it “measures the reading and comprehension of complex texts with accuracy and…
