David Robertson // ‘Suicide rate up 33%’ reads a recent news headline; ‘dementia skyrocketed by 117% over just 26 years’, reads another.[1] Internationally, health media today indicates a growing reliance on the quantitative representation of health findings, outcomes, and interventions in a display of what philosopher of science Ian Hacking once described, referring to the…
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Is Homebirth Safe? Problems of Classification
Liora O’Donnell Goldensher// The first thing I heard when I clicked on the link to Gatehouse Media’s recent story was a siren[1]. While I’d known a new long-form investigative project about out-of-hospital birth was underway, I wasn’t familiar with the publication or its goals, and neither were most of the midwives I know from my…
Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation”: Uncanny Neuroscience and the Radical Self-Exam
Lauren Mitchell // Ted Chiang’s short story “Exhalation,” which you can read online here, evokes pleasure alongside mourning. Written from the perspective of a nameless anatomist in a mechanized future, Chiang re-casts the body as an “extraordinary machine,” where air, flesh and blood is replaced by argon, metal and gold.
Cuento Therapy, Storytelling, and Men Who Abuse Women
Chuka Nestor Emezue // In 1985, Dr. Giuseppe Costantino and his colleagues, Drs. Robert G. Malgady, and Lloyd Henry Rogler, drafted their foremost paperback: “Cuento Therapy: folktales as a culturally sensitive psychotherapy for Puerto Rican children.” Their work provided instruction in Cuento Therapy, as well as its hopeful application to the field of child psychotherapy…
Reconciling Grief and Unfinished Conversations: A Reflection on ‘If I Had to Tell it Again’
Amala Poli // First published in 1990, William Styron’s Darkness Visible lays bare the nature of unipolar depression in his wrenching account of what he calls an “indescribable” illness (16). In the decades since Styron’s pivotal text on depression, memoirists have continued to write about illnesses of the mind, grappling with questions similar to the…
Demons, Diseases, and Definitions: Historicizing Mental Illness and Neurological Disorders
Claire Litt // “I brought You my son, who has a mute spirit. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down; he foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth, and becomes rigid.” (Mark 9:17-16:20, NKJV) Following the publication of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual…
The Invention of “Greek” Medicine
Calloway Scott // Early histories of medicine in the west typically traced the “invention” of scientific medicine to the “Greek miracle” of the Classical era (500-323 BCE). That this historiographic narrative—offering contemporary medical method and thought a compelling and authoritative origin—suited a wide variety of 19th and early 20th century interests is hardly surprising. Positivist histories of…
Call for Papers: CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network and Summer School, Paris 2019
CFP: CHCI Medical and Health Humanities Network Summer Institute Columbia Global Centers | Paris June 14-15, 2019 “Health Beyond Borders” The CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network is a partnership of over 30 universities worldwide working in the medical and health humanities. In 2019, the annual Summer Institute of the CHCI HMHN will be hosted…
Unlearning Eugenics: (Un)Forgetting Genetics
Mia Florin-Sefton // What’s cool about us/ we take our time/ we do it slow. These lines, taken from Eileen Myles’ poem Epic for You, bookend the concluding chapter of Dagmar Herzog’s new book: Unlearning Eugenics. What — one might very well ask — does this provocative and poetic evocation of sexual longing, lingering intimacy,…
Zika Coverage and the Limits of Repronormativity
Emilie Egger // After nearly two years of distressing headlines, the Zika virus had receded from mainstream news coverage. That was until a newly pregnant Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, set off for a tour of the South Pacific, where the virus has spread in recent months. The optics of hand wringing over the health…
