Image Credit: Angels in America, Millennium Approaches (1993) Poster, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under fair use license. Illness narratives often explore experiences that defy medical explanation. Sociologist Arthur Frank, writing about narrative and illness experience, argues that “telling stories is the attempt, instigated by the body’s disease, to give voice to an experience that medicine…
Author: Sabina Dosani
A letter to Professor Donald
A letter to Professor Donald This letter was inspired by the Early Ultrasound Scan, in the Royal College Of Physicians & Surgeons of Glasgow Archive (Catalogue number: RCPSG 65/3/1-2) Dear Professor Donald, When I saw the ultrasound scan, I thought of you: Ian Donald, obstetric pioneer from Glasgow. There are a few things I would…
Review of Laughing Boy, by Stephen Unwin, adapted from Sara Ryan’s memoir, Justice for Laughing Boy
“When the shit hits the fan, they blame the mum.” I will never forget these words. These are Dr Sara Ryan’s, an academic with extensive expertise in disability studies and autism. Her impassioned message is at the heart of Stephen Unwin’s play, Laughing Boy. Ryan’s autistic son, Connor Sparrowhawk, known affectionately by his family as…
Book Review: Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912
“Detachment is not the eternal emotional disposition of the surgical operator.” So concludes Michael Brown in Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912. By reconstructing the history of how emotions informed and often guided surgical decisions, he thoroughly dismantles any notion of the cold hearted surgeon.
“It looks like there’s no heartbeat” Imaging and imagining the obstetric ultrasound
When my pregnancies ended with the words: “Oh, it looks like there’s no heartbeat”, the word miscarriage jarred. Had I carried my baby badly? Was it my fault? I didn’t feel like a broken uterus, I felt like a heartbroken mother. As so often in women’s healthcare, I’ve since discovered it’s not just me. Could…
Please open with a vivid and compelling short story of a patient encounter
The textbooks that I used as a medical student in the 1990s were illustrated with photographs of real patients. I can vividly recall the images of three depicted patients, stripped naked, standing with their palms facing upwards, posed with their hands by their sides and feet shoulder width apart like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man….