Kaqchikel Maya Hearts Throughout history, the heart has long captivated attention. From heartbreak to heart attacks, there is a range of conditions deriving from the heart, encompassing a wide array of physiological and emotional states. Turning our attention to language, the heart is often used in emotional health expressions. However, moving beyond Western contexts, the…
Category: Race and Ethnicity
“Venereal Peril”: ‘Controlled’ Prostitution and French Regulationism After 1945
Penicillin and the French regulationist system The advent of penicillin in the 1930s marked a significant breakthrough that revolutionized the therapeutic landscape for diverse bacterial infections, including those causing venereal diseases (Brandt, Jones 1999). The use of penicillin during World War Two led to a decline in the incidence of syphilis and allowed for more…
Structural Pain: How the Humanities Help Reveal the “Hidden Figures” in Total Pain
As a palliative care clinician, I spend many moments throughout the week sitting in silence with patients, absorbing stories of discomfort and overwhelm, resisting platitudes, which I know can cause more harm than good. Remaining quiet requires training and discipline. “I always want to fill the space with words,” said a physician assistant student who…
Are These “Truths” Self-Evident: An Unsettling of the Terms That Define Us Part I
Human is not a neutral term. It is laced with socio-historical positionality that masquerades as neutral, universal, and even innocuous. What exactly do we mean when we invoke terms like human, humanity, or any other derivative? Suppose humanity is, in fact, universal, neutral, and innocuous. Why can people be rendered inhumane, commit crimes against humanity,…
Equitable Representation in Medical Textbooks
Erasure is the act of denying or refusing to acknowledge that people’s race and lived experiences in America differ through socioeconomic, historical, political, and legal factors. This concept of colorblindness, also known as erasure, is counterproductive when it results in the inability to recognize the need to include diverse representation and instead results in the…
Chinatown Poem
— “Chinatown Poem” is a cento poem written using language taken from billboards, commercial shop signs, advertisements, and other elements of the linguistic landscape of Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. The poem explores Chinatown as both a site of diasporic cultural production and a space where racist tropes and stereotypes about Asian people circulate and…
Coffee with a Colleague: Bioethicist Keisha Ray, PhD
Keisha Ray, PhD, is an Associate Professor of medical humanities and bioethics at McGovern Medical School in Houston, Texas. She is also an associate editor at the American Journal of Bioethics. Sarah L. Berry // This interview series features educators, scholars, artists, and healthcare providers whose work is vital to the growth of the health…
Representations and Discourses of Vietnamese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards, Part II
Clothing in Postcards of Algerian and Moroccan Women In many ways, garments were a marker of disparity between Vietnamese and North African colonial portraiture. In Algeria and Morocco, postcards were often organized around the veiled—or rather, unveiled—woman, a theme central to Orientalist art and photography. Colonialist photographers, such as Jean Geiser, Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst…
Representations and Discourses of Indochinese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards (1880s-1920s), Part I
In the opening of his influential book Orientalism, Edward Saïd exposed the dominance and hegemony of Western authors and artists in shaping and formulating the fundamental narratives about the ‘Orient’, emphasizing the binary and self-consolidating character of colonial discourse: A very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and…
Tropical Insects and the Colonial Entomopoiesis of Pestilence
In the era of human-induced climate change, insects have become the preeminent emissaries of Death, morphing the proverbial scythe into tiny tentacles of destruction. The invasion of tropical insects into the Global North has emerged as a key narrative template of the climate apocalypse: articles in scientific and journalistic outlets register the harrowing threat of…