Book Review: Caring Visualities, or Visualizing Care in Fixing Images

“Koat phey khmaoch, châng moel’ (she is afraid of ghosts, so she wants to look), he said to me, not turning from his typing… The ward is not specialized in ghosts (there are other experts for those beings), yet doctors and nurses understood that patients might connect pain or a dream with a supernatural intervention…

Book Review: Ohio Under Covid – Lessons from America’s Heartland in Crisis

Despite the incredible loss, turmoil, and uncertainty wrought by Covid-19, life has seemingly returned to “normal”. Federal (CDC) and global (UN) health agencies have declared an end to the public health emergency, and many of us have returned to work, gone back to school, and now interact without masks or social distancing. The media no…

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.

Medical Sensations – An Opportunity for a Medical Humanities Engagement

Amala Poli // I recently visited the Canadian Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa to explore the Medical Sensations exhibition, curated by David Pantalony and launched in November, 2017. The curation of this exhibition reveals a profound engagement with medical humanities by enabling the visitor to interact with medical culture. Organized around the five senses,…

Review: Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, by Ruha Benjamin

Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, offers an expansive, interdisciplinary, and accessible vision of not just the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the untenability of our current systems, but also the ways we might—through small, day-to-day interactions just as much as sweeping, systemic change—seed and proliferate justice that…

Book Review: Incurables: Relatos de dolencias y males, edited by Oswaldo Estrada

Estrada, Oswaldo, editor. Incurables: Relatos de dolencia y males. Ars Communis Editorial, 2020. 228 pages. ¿En qué país estamos, Agripina? [What country are we in, Agripina?] In his introduction to Incurables: Relatos de dolencias y males, Oswaldo Estrada reminds readers that “las dolencias y males siempre han producido prejuicios, miedos, pánico. Hay males visibles e…

A review of Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters

Amala Poli // Community performance artist and disability culture activist Petra Kuppers’ latest work Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounter is a reimagination of the embodied self in the world through a recognition of multiple life worlds and forms in contested spaces. The text models a form of inquiry, inviting the reader…

Book Review: Midlife: Humanity’s Secret Weapon

Benjamin Hulett // Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory and his own experience as a psychotherapist, Andrew Jamieson’s slim Midlife: Humanity’s Secret Weapon (2022) testifies to the positive personal transformations that midlife crises can occasion. However, Jamieson’s edifying claims falter when the book precipitately casts the West as the ethical vanguard of humanity’s history and evolution. Jamieson…