How did Japanese people view organs and body? How do you view the inside of your body?
Category: Uncategorized
On Queer Equity and Eugenics: The Question of In Vitro Gametogenesis
As NPR recently reported, scientists may be on the verge of succeeding at a procedure called In Vitro Gametogenesis (often shorthanded as IVG). IVG allows for the fertilization of eggs and sperm in a laboratory. These fertilized embryos could in theory carry any genes. Enthusiasm at the prospect of IVG for humans followed the procedure’s…
To Our Dearly Departed: Intimacy and Grief
As a poet, writing a poem is one of my ways of being in the world, and certainly one of my most effective ways of dealing with complicated emotions. My brother died of metastatic colorectal cancer in early June 2019. Since his death, I have charted time in terms of his death: there is before…
Inequities in Labor: Sports, Slavery, and Imperiled Pregnancies
Sara Press// Two months ago, an American Olympic athlete named Torie Bowie died alone at home during childbirth.[1] The track star’s autopsy report states that Bowie died due to “complications from respiratory distress and eclampsia,” the latter condition being linked to “high blood pressure during pregnancy.”[2] High blood pressure levels have frequently been associated with…
You Threw This at Us. Now We’re Throwing It Back at You.
What is the most violent thing a member of the medical community ever told you ? “You Threw This at Us. Now We’re Throwing It Back at You.” is a collaborative and performative piece about medical abuse.
Inside-Out: TOFI, Skinny-Fat, and the Logic of Epidemic “Obesity”
In the 2011 documentary Fed Up pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig, discussing the use of medical imaging to investigate body composition, states that “when you slide somebody [who is thin] into an MRI and you actually visualize the fat, they might as well be obese” (Soechtig 1:12:59-1:13:14, emphasis mine). The statement accompanies footage of fat teen…
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…
Review: “Narrative Medicine in Education, Practice, and Interventions”
Review: “Narrative Medicine in Education, Practice, and Interventions” Anders Juhl Rasmussen, Anne-Marie Mai, and Helle Ploug Hansen, Eds. (Anthem Press: 2023) The new collection Narrative Medicine in Education, Practice, and Interventions primarily evaluates the accomplishments of our field—whatever name we give it—when it comes to conveying and activating affect in practice, with most work coming…
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…
Trapped in a Paradigm: Canadian Inuit and Medical Transportation in Healthcare
In the late 1940s, the Canadian federal government began to respond to the epidemic scale of tuberculosis affecting Inuit in the Arctic. The chosen treatment method was to transport Inuit with positive tuberculosis diagnoses by ship, hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from their homes, to sanitoria in southern Canada.Thus began the model of medical…