Hello and welcome to our new online journal. What is health and how do we achieve it are questions that have never been more salient. Our ability to modify bodies through biotechnology has rendered life increasingly transformable. But alongside the incredible transformations in reproductive health, cancer care and genetic medicine, growing inequalities have exacerbated health... Continue Reading →
The Medical Woman in Victorian Fiction and Her Service to the Empire
At the end of the nineteenth century, the medical woman was simultaneously progressive and traditional. As one of the first women professionals she helped elevate the importance of women to healthcare, and her distinctly feminine qualities helped her save lives. Perhaps most importantly, however, she helped promote the British Empire. The last decade of the... Continue Reading →
“For your own good”: Health as moral value and political weapon
The focus of World Health Day 2018, which took place last Saturday, was on ensuring universal health coverage. Whilst the UK is often lauded as being superior to our American counterparts for having a universal healthcare system, closer scrutiny reveals that this is not always the case. More than this, it is often in... Continue Reading →
Metaphor, Medical Decisions and the Military Mindset
How would you describe what it is like to live with an injured and chronically painful limb? How would you communicate to a medical professional your reasoning for wanting the elective amputation of that limb? I have recently been pondering how people talk about their bodily experiences, both to their friends and family, and medical... Continue Reading →
Can Art Save? Liberal Humanism, Empathy, and the “Use” of Creativity — Part III
Sneha Mantri This is the last in a 3-part series examining the “usefulness” of creativity through the lens of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. Part 1 contextualized the students' art as a manifestation of Romantic tropes; Part 2 took on the climactic, Gothic confrontation between the students and their former headmistress. This final section "goes... Continue Reading →
The World We See – Part 6: Art that Moves, in More Ways than One
At first glance, Naum Gabo’s Kinetic Construction is nothing special. A thin, motionless steel rod extends from a pit located in the base of a black square. With the push of a button, however, the rod springs to life. The rod wiggles back and forth as a motor beneath the base whirs with a soft... Continue Reading →
Cultivating “Epistemological Humility”: How to Reimagine the Medical Humanities
Sari Altschuler. The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. In The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Devin Griffiths defined the field of science and literature in terms of its “central object”: “to explain the role of... Continue Reading →
Hints to Mothers, 1837/2018
Livia Arndal Woods // Last month, there was some popular coverage of a recent article in the medical journal Obstetrics and Gynecology. Nathan S. Fox, MD’s “Dos and Don'ts in Pregnancy: Truths and Myths” frames its intervention as evidence-based common-sense pregnancy-best-practices in an “age of the internet” in which women are “bombarded” with more information... Continue Reading →
Review of “Literature and Medicine,” Part 1
Cynthia Harris // This month, I will discuss the fascinating and excellently done recent issue of the journal “Literature and Medicine.” This issue’s articles all address the nature of “fashionable diseases,” that is, diseases with a “novel, modish prominence,” that rose and fell in popularity over the decades during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (239,... Continue Reading →
Thinking beyond US disability studies: cure as case study
Kathryn Cai // Alongside Travis Lau and Roanne Kantor’s engagements with disability studies on this forum, I would like to continue building on their lines of thought to consider how the “medical humanities” can become more open and attuned to the questions of disability studies and a broader critical health humanities that encompasses a greater... Continue Reading →
