Ghosts and Angels: The Supernatural in Illness Narratives

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…

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…

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.

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….