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…
Synapsis in Paris: Allegories in Exit West
Sneha Mantri // In this post, I want to reframe and expand on the provocations I presented at the CHCI medical humanities conference this year. The bulk of my talk was an analysis of Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 novel Exit West,[1] through the lens of medical education and practice. As a physician and educator, I’m deeply…
Synapsis in Paris: Field Notes: How to be Generative
Darian Goldin Stahl, Artist-in-Residence // Field Notes: How to be Generative Silk, wax, toner, and multimedia 4″ x 4″ 2019 Field Notes: How to be Generative is an artist’s book made in response to the “Book as Body” Artist’s Book Atelier, conducted by myself and Reader of Medical Humanities Stella Bolaki at the CHCI Paris…
Synapsis in Paris: “A Hundred Times More Dangerous than Terrorism”
Rising eco-conciousness in India and some thoughts on comparison Roanne Kantor // In what follows, I want to first extend the few scattered thoughts I presented at the CHCI conference in Paris about the shift in eco-conscious rhetoric that I observed in various sites in North India when I returned there for the first time…
Images of an Imagined Future: Photographing Deinstitutionalization in a Developing World
David Robertson // In the 1950s, the World Health Organization (WHO) engaged in a global effort to improve the treatment of institutionalized psychiatric patients. In the newly coined “developing nations” this support tended to target those in which a sizeable psychiatric infrastructure was already in place, including postcolonial nations like India and the Philippines. A…
Medicine in the Archive: Exploring Feminism and Nursing
John A. Carranza // Being a historian comes with no better rite of passage than to enter the archive. Regardless of the time period or topic chosen by the researcher, sorting through the documents is exciting for me because I am able to engage in an imaginative and interpretative exercise where I consider why a…
Bodies in Stone III
Calloway Scott // In the previous post, I concentrated on the dedication of “anatomical ex-votos” within the healing sanctuaries of the Greek god Asklepios. These more-or-less realistic coroplastic representations of body parts were offered to the god of healing (as well as other divinities like Apollo and Aphrodite) as offerings of thanks for successful cures….
Existential Research Notes, Or Pregnancy in the News
Livia Arndal Woods // For the better part of the past decade, my scholarship has focused on representations of pregnancy in the Victorian novel. This focus has often resonated with 21st century pregnancy narratives, and I’ve written about that. I’ve written less about the ways in which my scholarship has resonated with my lived experience…
Authentic Empathy & Therapeutic Alliances (Part 2)
In a previous Synapsis post, I introduced the notion of the Therapeutic Alliance (TA) – an active ingredient of psychopathology and psychotherapy. I discussed the antecedence of therapeutic relationships formed between victim service providers (VSPs) and male victims of sexual assault (e.g. rape, molestation, sodomy, etc.). My interest? Their therapeutic and extra-therapeutic rehabilitation and healing, and how this process (a continuum of healing, more or less) is impacted by social stigma. Male victims infrequently seek care, making further scholarship in this domain problematical, but welcoming.
The Smile: A Confusing Expression for Every Occasion
James Belarde // “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” -Thích Nhất Hạnh One of the biggest smiles I’ve ever flashed came after purposefully having my jaw broken, subsequently facing a six-week period where I couldn’t chew. While this sounds masochistic at…
In reproductive health care, experience frames more rigorous academic questions
Emilie Egger // “Is it anti-feminist to question the Pill?,” asks writer Anna Silman in her June article in The Cut. In her discussion of the birth-control pill and its side effects, Silman chronicles rising concerns among people who take hormonal birth control. In a piece released the same week in The New York Times,…
