Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo// I’d play on loop Joe Walsh’s “Life of Illusion” as I watched the news for days. For the first couple of months, I became fixated on the body count numbers. I have generally maintained an apoplectic attitude towards death (theoretically), knowing full well that this is one of life’s certainties, we die. It…
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A Most Health-Giving Flood: Spatial Promiscuity in E M Forster’s A Passage to India
Bassam Sidiki // E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) may be one of the most important novels chronicling the spatial logics of segregation during the zenith of the British Raj. However, critical work on colonial space in the novel often ignores the centrality of health and disease in the narrative and how they…
Confronting the Consequences of a Single Story
Sara Press// Every person pictured has consented to having their portraits shared publicly. In 2009, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED Talk on “The Danger of a Single Story.”[1] In her talk, Adichie advocates for the importance of storytelling, but cautions against homogenizing complex humans and situations into a single narrative. She explains, “The…
Book Review: Breast Cancer Inside Out: Bodies, Biographies & Beliefs
Phyllisa Deroze // Kimberly R. Myers (editor). Breast Cancer Inside Out: Bodies, Biographies & Beliefs. Peter Lang Press, 2021. ISBN: 9781788747356, $82.95, E-book. It is a rare treasure to find a book that provides such rich and in-depth perspectives into the lives of people experiencing breast cancer. Kimberly R. Myers’ latest book, Breast Cancer Inside…
Book Review: So Much More than a Headache: Understanding Migraine Through Literature
Sam Allen Wright// Kathleen J. O’Shea (editor). So Much More than a Headache: Understanding Migraine Through Literature. Kent State University Press, 2020, 232 pp., ISBN: 978-1606354032 $34.95, paperback As a disability studies and medical humanities scholar, I’d like to think that I know that migraines are more than “just a headache.” But the truth is…
Renaissance Cosmetic ‘Secrets’ in the Age of Home-Beauty: Continuity and Change
Claire Litt // Over the last year the beauty stars of Youtube and Instagram have come face-to-face (or face to mirror, rather) with one of the more superficial spin-off crises caused by the pandemic: the inaccessibility of cosmetic treatments due to the closure of beauty salons. At first glance, it’s a crisis that is literally…
Double Bind. A Collaborative Piece on Care and Its Mixed Perceptions
Pauline Picot // Being taken care of is serious. Being taken care of is the first thing you experience when you come to life. You surrender to another human being and in doing so, you establish your first human relationship. Being taken care of is belonging to someone; being the object of their care. Being…
The Quick, the Dead and the Anatomised: How a dissection drawing workshop morphed into an online event.
Dr Jac Saorsa, Artist-in-Residence// Each year since 2015 I have been visiting the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) at the University of Dundee in Scotland, UK, where, in the spring semester, I give an illustrated talk about my work in the medical humanities for the students studying for the MSc Medical Art qualification….
A first time teaching African medical crisis from afar: Uncomfortable global north-south juxtapositions
Renée van der Wiel // I have been in the global north, what is for me a relatively exotic place, while designing a social anthropology course. The course is about healthcare professionals and institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. In the past I taught students in my home city, Johannesburg, in buildings literally only a few kilometers…
Reproductive politics everywhere: review of Reproduction on the Reservation by Brianna Theobald
Emilie Egger // Of her archival research process for her 2019 monograph Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century, historian Brianna Theobald writes that she “never knew where biological reproduction would pop up in the historical record or what would emerge as important context” (14). This realization holds the…
