“Don’t be afraid of the blood and guts,” Kathleen Watt smiled while signing a copy of her book: “there are many entry points.” Watt, a former New York City opera singer, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer that initially filled the space behind her right cheekbone and continued to spread—“occupying the space where…
Tag: book review
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;…
Book Review: Ohio Under Covid – Lessons from America’s Heartland in Crisis
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…
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…