Hope has been widely recognized as playing a crucial role in the recovery process of people living with mental illness. When the possibility of recovery in the future becomes imaginable, patients can also (re)experience pleasure and satisfaction in the present (Schrank et al. 230–34). Yet the universal potential of hope for recovery remains difficult to…
Tag: narrative
How to Talk to a Doctor (as a woman)
Tianyuan Huang // Reviewing recommendations on how to see a doctor from a women’s health journal in 1911, this essay explores physician-patient communication and what the distribution of responsibilities and powers tells us about a health culture in its fast evolving historical context.
Exit, pursued by a Shark: A Pandemic in Four or More Acts
Emily Waples // Following reports of the President’s coronavirus infection, Twitter was replete with a certain kind of comment, expressing consensus that something—the presidency, the country, the year 2020—had decidedly jumped the shark. A throng of commenters including Dr. Bob Wachter, Chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine—who has tweeted copiously about COVID-19 in an…
Parenting in Public, from Passivity to Peace
Mira Assaf Kafantaris and Alicia Andrzejewski Introduction Is the affective experience of public parenting a health concern, a concern for the medical humanities? Certainly, the constant surveillance of parents, mothers in particular, is born out of care and concern for the well-being of children. This surveillance and the interventions/invasions it inspires, however, result in a…
Reading into Diagnosis
Sarah Roth // The Genetics Department at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. displays hundreds of pamphlets in the waiting room, stacked at every corner table. Some of them I recognize, having revised them back in the office. The pamphlets have titles like: What is My Family Tree Telling Me? and PKU and You….
The Criminal Mind: Discourses of Mental Health and Crime, Part 2.
Enlarged Photograph from “Brains of Feebleminded and Criminalist Persons,” a display at the 1921 Second International Congress of Eugenics. Part of Myrtelle M. Canavan Papers, 1898-1945, GA 10.20 “Myrtell Used with permission from the Harvard Medical Library. Abigail Jane Mack I began Part 1 of this series with the image I reproduce here. Item number 1552…