Despite the incredible loss, turmoil, and uncertainty wrought by Covid-19, life has seemingly returned to “normal”. Federal (CDC) and global (UN) health agencies have declared an end to the public health emergency, and many of us have returned to work, gone back to school, and now interact without masks or social distancing. The media no…
Tag: book review
Review: Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, by Ruha Benjamin
Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, offers an expansive, interdisciplinary, and accessible vision of not just the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the untenability of our current systems, but also the ways we might—through small, day-to-day interactions just as much as sweeping, systemic change—seed and proliferate justice that…
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…
“Let us confess it”: Review of Amala Poli’s Writing the Self in Illness
Sarah Roth // What does it mean to give voice to an experience of illness in literary form, and what modes of attention are asked of a reader as she engages with what is written?
Review: Cesarean Sections & Risk: Ongoing Evolution of a Procedure
John A. Carranza // On September 19, 2019, the website Motherly posted an article entitled “These Birth Photos Prove How Beautiful Clear Drape C-Sections Can Be.” Heather Marcoux, the author, explained what “gentle cesarean sections” are and how they have come to transform the cesarean section procedure in contemporary medicine. Previously, the operation included physicians…
Morality, aesthetics, and fatness: review of Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body
Emilie Egger // Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Bathroom scales, sugar, Cosmopolitan magazine: these three items are linked in contemporary Western understanding of weight loss and management. The first is a gauge of adherence to medical and cultural norms of health;…
Mother-tales: otherness and doubt in the neonatal intensive care unit
Emily Wheater // Recently in Synapsis, Jessica M.E. Kirwan discussed the portrayal by male, Enlightenment-era physicians of mothers in obstetric texts and images. William Hunter’s illustrations of pregnant bodies are deeply dehumanising in their presentation of butchered female bodies, and gradually stripping away the mother’s body altogether leaving just the uterus behind. What a wonderful…
Weaving the Tapestry of the History of Psychiatry: Anne Harrington’s ‘Mind Fixers’
David Robertson // Over the last twenty years, considerable scholarly contributions have been made to the history of psychiatry. We have had historical analyses of the concept of “nerves” and “neurasthenia,” of “trauma” and the emergence of diagnoses such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.[1] Historians have examined the material settings of neuropsychiatric efforts to localize brain…
Illness as Muse and the Poet-Physician: Rafael Campo’s Comfort Measures Only
Travis Chi Wing Lau // Rafael Campo. Comfort Measures Only: New & Selected Poems, 1994-2016. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. “Illness is a problem for the human imagination only insomuch as we might seek dispassionately scientific methods to cure it while we avoid the inevitably destructive pressures it exerts on our fragile psyches.” – Rafael…
Turning to the Structural in the Health Humanities
Gabi Schaffzin // I remember being at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in 2014 when Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe gave one of the keynotes. The Yale-educated former investment banker was explaining how the healthcare related portfolio that she had managed in her past life actually profited from people getting sick; she…