In A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (New York University Press, 2026), Professor Thomas F. Rzeznik offers a comprehensive look into the daily operations of the long-standing, titular hospital. Through this process, Rzeznik celebrates some of the more influential women among the ranks of the Sisters…
Tag: body
Disability, Empowerment, and Art: On Hospital Aesthetics with Amanda Cachia
Amanda Cachia’s Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism was published by Manchester University Press last September. Cachia is a curator and art historian with a joint appointment as Professor of Practice in Museum Studies at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in Disability Studies….
Therapy or Enhancement? Bioethics in Transhumanist Science Fictional Interpretations of the Body
Image Credit: Sanderson, Bill. “The gyri of the thinker’s brain as a maze of choices in biomedical ethics.” Scraperboard drawing, 1997. Wellcome Collection. [Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)] Therapy or Enhancement? Bioethics in Transhumanist Science Fictional Interpretations of the Body Since the Enlightenment, the idea of perpetual progress and the hegemony of rationality have…
The Rupture of Silence: The Body, Language, and The Power Dynamics in Health with Monica Ong
In “The Vulnerable and the Political,” Estelle Ferrarese talks about the affinity between care and the management of vulnerability. Both become political as they pertain to individual and social bodies. “The distribution of care,” Ferrarese says, “depends on patterns of domination and historical organizations that may stem from the sedimentation of gendered roles…” (237). Social…
The Geographic Self
The Communication of Pain In her book The Body in Pain, Scarry discusses the way that pain “shatters language” and threatens to be “unsharable” (4,5). She describes how pain belongs to an internal geography, when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to…
Review: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
When Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive was published by Alice James Press last year, I couldn’t put it down—and after I finished reading through it, I didn’t want to put it down. I kept it in my car as I drove to the National Institutes of Health for a bioethics fellowship;…
(Dis)articulation: “Broken Ladies” and the Anatomized Female Body
Articulating symptoms of illness often first requires dis-articulation: this part hurts; this one thing happened; I started feeling this, then this; are these things related? First narrativized as a series of observations, symptoms separate out into individual signs (one symptom, after all, could be the effect of one cause, but a different symptom could be…
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…
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.
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…