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Following the Science in the Age of COVID-19 Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 Sander L. Gilman
This article discusses the complexity of the relationship between “law,” “science,” and “clinical practice” in the age of COVID-19.
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The Telegraphic Body: Dyspepsia, Modern Life, and ‘Gastric Time’ in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Culture Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-16 Emilie Taylor-Pirie
From Italian physician Hieronymus Mercurialis’s contention that the stomach was ‘the king of the belly’, to its promotion by the end of the nineteenth century to the ‘monarch of humanity’ in patent medicine, to Byron Robinson’s discovery of the enteric nervous system in 1907 (a mesh of neural connectivity that led him to dub the gut ‘the second brain’), there has historically been a longstanding awareness
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Breaking Taboos: Arab Breast Cancer Activism in Art and Popular Culture Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-13 Abir Hamdar
This essay examines the breast cancer accounts of four Arab female celebrities who have spoken out in public about their illness experience: the Egyptian TV presenter Basma Wahba and the actress Yasmine Ghaith, the Iraqi actress Namaa al-Ward, and the Lebanese pop singer Elissa. By reading their testimonies against the backdrop of critical literature on illness narratives and memoirs, as well as on
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The Poetic Wavelength—Tuning into the Meaningful Poetics of Psychosis Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-12 Mark Pearson
Despite the emerging evidence base to support the therapeutic potential of creative writing and poetry for a variety of mental health problems, the therapeutic potential of poetry for people who have experienced psychosis remains poorly understood. The paper argues that by considering psychosis as meaningful poetics, this epistemological shift has the potential to foster curious inquiry and increase
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New Chaotic Reality: Creative Writing Workshops for Long COVID Patients Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-09 Ed Garland
In a widely cited 2017 study, Robinson et al. (2017) found that ‘emotionally expressive’ writing makes physical wounds heal faster when compared to writing that did not engage the emotions. The Writing Long COVID project at Aberystwyth University engaged similar territory in a recent pilot study. Participants’ writing activities explored how literary production can affect a person’s experience of this
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“Undoubtedly a race, but they are not human”: Immuno-politics and the Recognition of the Jew as Pathogenic Nonself in Art Spiegelman’s Maus Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-04 Arindam Nandi
This article engages with the immuno-political juxtaposition of the healthy self and the pathogenic other to critically examine the representation of Nazis and Jews in Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus (1996). Written as a postmemory narrative, Maus recounts the horrors experienced by the author’s father Vladek Spiegelman as a survivor of the Holocaust that claimed an approximate
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Edvard Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life: Towards a Curatorial Medical Humanities Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-04 Allison Morehead
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Moses’s Code Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-02 Elizabeth Toll
In this narrative essay, a happenstance encounter with a journal article rekindles the author’s intense memories of a cardiac resuscitation 25 years earlier during internship. Recollections of observations, emotions, and professional interactions around this event prompt reflection about the painful experiences from training that remain seared into memory and the value of these formative moments across
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Silent Speech in Phaswane Mpe’s HIV/AIDS Writing Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-31 Sheila Giffen
South African writer Phaswane Mpe (1970—2004) is often canonized and memorialized as a brave truth-teller who broke the silence on HIV/AIDS in the context of government silence and denial. And yet Mpe’s writings—including poetry, short stories, a novel, and scholarly criticism—contemplate illness as a problem for truth and representation in works that linger in silence and ambiguity. This article analyses
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Clean Up Before Tomorrow! : A Call to Action Against Aedes. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-27 Srikanth Srirama
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Book Review of Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, edited by Renée Fleming. New York: Viking, 2024. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-20 Eric Persaud
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Telling Ecopoetic Stories: Wax Worms, Care, and the Cultivation of Other Sensibilities Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-15 Martin Grünfeld
Recently, a beekeeper discovered the metabolic wizardry of wax worms, their ability to decompose polyethylene. While this organism has usually been perceived as a model organism in science or a pest to beekeepers, it acquired a new mode of being as potentially probiotic, inviting us to dream of a future without plastic waste. In this paper, I explore how wax worms are entangled with material practices
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Who Counts? Care, Disability, and the Questionnaire in Jesse Ball’s Census Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Emily Hall
In the Biopolitics of Disability, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2015) assert that disabled people are subjected to endless health and government questionnaires that harvest their data in exchange for better care. As disability advocates such as the National Disability Rights Network (2021) have demonstrated, these questionnaires—like the 2020 census—are highly flawed because disabled populations
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Coming Apart/Becoming Whole: A Collection of Poems. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-27 Hannah May,Leslie Williams,Mark Fryburg,Cathryn Hankla,Jaimee Hills,Phoebe Reeves,Sarah N Cross
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Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging: A Health Humanities Consortium Initiative Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Sarah L. Berry, Samantha Chipman, Melanie E. Gregg, Hailey Haffey, Neşe Devenot, Juliet McMullin
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Using Comics as Data Collection and Training Tools to Understand and Prevent Provider-Enacted HIV Stigma Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-23 J. Blake Scott, Christa L. Cook, Nathan Holic, Maeher Sukhija, Aislinn Woody
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Shame-Sensitive Public Health Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-23 Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal, Arthur Rose
In this article, we argue that shaming interventions and messages during Covid-19 have drawn the relationship between public health and shame into a heightened state of contention, offering us a valuable opportunity to reconsider shame as a desired outcome of public health work, and to push back against the logics of individual responsibility and blame for illness and disease on which it sits. We begin
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On Wor(l)ds and Pandemics Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-22 Jorge J. Locane
The spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has stimulated eschatological speculation. To the environmentalist and liberal diagnostician that had already been warning about the Anthropocene and the breakdown of post-Cold War global harmony, an alarm has now been added that in its worst prognosis estimates that, in 2020, we only started witnessing the beginning of a staggered health debacle. The idea of
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Migration and Mental Health in Two Contemporary Memoirs Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-22 Lena Englund
This article examines two autobiographical texts that address the relationship between migration and struggles with mental health: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans (2021) and Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You (2020). Both memoirs help bring mental health issues to light in situations of precarity, and the texts indicate that it is not just
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A Heavy Heart and the End of an Era: The Closure of My Hospital. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-16 Subhash Chander
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Moving Beyond Clinical Imaginaries: Technogeographies of the Everyday Urban Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-13 Daryl Martin, Dara Ivanova, Thorben Peter Høj Simonsen
In this paper, we analyse the intersections between care and place in mundane spaces not explicitly designed for the provision of care, and where digital technologies are used to mediate ecologies of distress in the city. We locate our analysis alongside studies of how digital technologies impact the experience of care within non-clinical spaces, whilst noting that much research on the use of technologies
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“This was never about a virus”: Perceptions of Vaccination Hazards and Pandemic Risk in #Covid19NZ Tweets Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-10 Maebh Long, Andreea Calude, Jessie Burnette
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Regulated Pandemic Spaces: Spatial Crises in COVID Comics Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-10 Ishani Anwesha Joshi, Sathyaraj Venkatesan
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A Dialogue about Vaccine Side Effects: Understanding Difficult Pandemic Experiences Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Mia-Marie Hammarlin, Pia Dellson
This paper investigates the relationship between the experiences of mass vaccinations against two pandemic viruses: the swine flu in 2009–2010 and COVID-19 in the early 2020s. We show how distressing memories from the swine flu vaccination, which led to the rare but severe adverse effect of narcolepsy in approximately 500 children in Sweden, were triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The narcolepsy illness
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Complicating Objectification in the Medical Encounter: Embodied Experiences in the ICU during COVID-19 Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-02 Allan Køster, Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Lars Peter Kloster Andersen
Illness and injury are often accompanied by experiences of bodily objectification. Medical treatments intended to restore the structure or function of the body may amplify these experiences of objectification by recasting the patient’s body as a biomedical object—something to be examined, measured, and manipulated. In this article, we contribute to the phenomenology of embodiment in illness and medicine
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Memory Remains Blood Soluble : After Brian Sneeden. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-02 Maya J Sorini
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Global Political Logics and Mainstream Discourses on Illness in the Declarations of the State of Exception in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Case of the USA, France, and Spain Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-26 Mar Rosàs Tosas
At the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, several countries declared “states of exception,” that is, authorized legal devices that, in the face of circumstances deemed catastrophic, permit the implementation of extraordinary measures and the temporary suspension of some rights in order to restore the previous state of affairs as soon as possible. This paper offers a comparative textual analysis of
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A Qualitative Phenomenological Philosophy Analysis of Affectivity and Temporality in Experiences of COVID-19 and Remaining Symptoms after COVID-19 in Sweden Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-26 Kristin Zeiler, Sofia Morberg Jämterud, Anna Bredström, Anestis Divanoglou, Richard Levi
This article explores affectivity, temporality, and their interrelation in patients who contracted COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in Sweden and with symptoms indicative of post-COVID-19 Condition (PCC) that remained one year after the infection. It offers a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis, showing how being ill with acute COVID-19 and with symptoms indicative of PCC
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Illness Narratives Without the Illness: Biomedical HIV Prevention Narratives from East Africa Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-26 Jason Johnson-Peretz, Fredrick Atwine, Moses R. Kamya, James Ayieko, Maya L. Petersen, Diane V. Havlir, Carol S. Camlin
Illness narratives invite practitioners to understand how biomedical and traditional health information is incorporated, integrated, or otherwise internalized into a patient’s own sense of self and social identity. Such narratives also reveal cultural values, underlying patterns in society, and the overall life context of the narrator. Most illness narratives have been examined from the perspective
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The Value of Researcher Reflexivity in the Coproduction of Public Policy: A Practical Perspective Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-24 Yamini Cinamon Nair, Mark Fabian
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The Use of Hand Gestures (Hastas) in Bharatanatyam for Creative Aging Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-24 Sloka Iyengar
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Narrating Loneliness: Isolation, Disaffection, and the Contemporary Novel Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-22 Neus Rotger
This article focuses on the ways in which narrative accounts of loneliness in literature problematize current definitions of this important and yet underexplored determinant of health. I argue that the prevailing conceptualization of loneliness in health research, with a general emphasis on social prescribing, obscures other dimensions of loneliness beyond social connectedness that also need to be
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The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, by Carl Elliott. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-21 Carolyn Riley Chapman
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Self-Testing for Dementia: A Phenomenological Analysis of Fear Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-12 Alexandra Kapeller, Marjolein de Boer
Following the growing economic relevance of mobile health (mHealth) and the increasing global prevalence of dementia, self-testing apps for dementia and mild neurocognitive disorder (MCD) have been developed and advertised. The apps’ promise of a quick and easy tool has been criticized in the literature from a variety of angles, but as we argue in this article, the celebratory characterization of self-testing
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Caring for/with Modernist Playthings: Fidgeting with Objects in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-29 Ishita Krishna
Modernist literature of the early to mid-twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic is replete with examples of a particular kind of relationship with objects, namely, the touching, collecting, and grasping of small, often highly personal, and ostensibly quotidian objects. From John’s glass collection in Woolf’s “Solid Objects,” Peter Walsh’s stroking of his pocket-knife in Mrs. Dalloway, Miriam’s
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A New Construct in Undergraduate Medical Education Health Humanities Outcomes: Humanistic Practice Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-16 Rebecca L. Volpe, Bernice L. Hausman, Katharine B. Dalke
Proposed educational outcomes for the health humanities in medical education range from empathy to visual thinking skills to social accountability. This lack of widely agreed-upon high-level curricular goals limits humanities educators’ ability to design purposeful curricula toward clear, common ends and threatens justifications for scarce curricular time. We propose a novel approach to the hoped-for
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Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines, by Stuart Murray. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Kristi L Kirschner
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When Play Reveals the Ache: Introducing Co-constructive Patient Simulation for Narrative Practitioners in Medical Education Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Indigo Weller, Maura Spiegel, Marco Antonio de Carvalho Filho, Andrés Martin
Despite the ubiquity of healthcare simulation and the humanities in medical education, the two domains of learning remain unintegrated. The stories suffused within healthcare simulation have thus remained unshaped by the developments of narrative medicine and the health humanities. Healthcare simulation, in turn, has yet to utilize concepts like co-construction and narrative competence to enrich learners’
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Existential Well-Being in Nature: A Cross-Cultural and Descriptive Phenomenological Approach Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-13 Børge Baklien, Marthoenis Marthoenis, Miranda Thurston
Exploring the putative role of nature in human well-being has typically been operationalized and measured within a quantitative paradigm of research. However, such approaches are limited in the extent to which they can capture the full range of how natural experiences support well-being. The aim of the study was to explore personal experiences in nature and consider how they might be important to human
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A Psychoneuroimmunological Reading of Jane Austen’s Persuasion in the Context of Bodily Aging Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-05 Rocío Riestra-Camacho, Miguel Ángel Jordán Enamorado
Jane Austen normally avoids discussing appearance throughout her works. Persuasion constitutes the exception to the rule, as the story focuses on the premature aging experienced by her protagonist, Anne Elliot, seemingly due to disappointed love. Much has been written about Anne’s “loss of bloom,” but never from the perspective of psychoneuroimmunology, the field that researches the interrelation between
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Empowering Self-Care: Caring Things in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s 1890s “New Woman” Short Fiction Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-03 Isobel Sigley
Alice Dunbar-Nelson is mostly remembered as a poet, activist, and ex-wife of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her volume The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899) has been largely overshadowed as a result. Yet, the collection contains a portfolio of heroines analogous and contemporaneous to the famed New Woman figure of the fin de siècle. In this article, I consider Dunbar-Nelson’s heroines in light
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Novel Integration of a Health Equity Immersion Curriculum in Medical Training Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Kendra G Hotz, Allison Silverstein, Austin Dalgo
Health disparities education is an integral and required part of medical professional training, and yet existing curricula often fail to effectively denaturalize injustice or empower learners to advocate for change. We discuss a novel collaborative intervention that weds the health humanities to the field of health equity. We draw from the health humanities an intentional focus retraining provider
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“Inside Out of Mind”: Alternative Realities, Dementia and Graphic Medicine Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Laboni Das, Sathyaraj Venkatesan
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On the Lookout for a Crack: Disruptive Becomings in Karoline Georges’s Novel Under the Stone Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Dominique Hétu
Informed by medical science and biotechnology, Karoline Georges’s novel Under the Stone offers a reflection on suffering bodies and imagines responses to an overwhelming sense of fear and passivity that embodied trauma and the world’s many crises can create. In line with the editors’ reclaiming of the milieu for the medical humanities, I draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy and Sara Ahmed’s
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“Bound Tightly in the Pack”: Cloth and Care in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Christopher M. Rudeen
Talk therapy is, by definition, difficult, if not impossible, to represent materially. Whereas other scholars have sought to do so by referencing Sigmund Freud’s drawings or the setting of his consulting room, this article looks instead to the use of cloth in Joanne Greenberg’s 1964 semiautobiographical novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. The two main treatments given to protagonist Deborah Blau
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Our Newspaper as Care: Narrative Approaches in Fanon’s Psychiatry Clinic Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Nathalie Egalité
This paper argues that the newspaper Notre Journal enshrined the importance of narrative in the revolutionary psychiatry of its founder and editor, Frantz Fanon. Anchoring my analysis in the interdisciplinarity of the medical humanities, I demonstrate how care at Hôpital Blida-Joinville in colonial Algeria was mediated by the written word. I examine Fanon’s physician writing and editorial texts detailing
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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, by Maddie Mortimer. London: Picador, 2022. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Arden Hegele
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“Illness Calls for Stories”: Care, Communication, and Community in the COVID-19 Patient Narrative Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Rosalind Crocker
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Wait for Me: Chronic Mental Illness and Experiences of Time During the Pandemic Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-12-26 Lindsey Beth Zelvin
As someone diagnosed with severe chronic mental illness early in my adolescence, I have spent over half of my life feeling out of step with the rest of the world due to hospitalizations, treatment programs, and the disruptions caused by anxiety, anorexia, depression, and obsessive–compulsive disorder. The effect of my mental health conditions compounded by these treatment environments means I often
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Advancing Global Health Equity: The Role of the Liberal Arts in Health Professional Education Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-12-16 Abebe Bekele, Denis Regnier, Tomlin Paul, Tsion Yohannes Waka, Elizabeth H. Bradley
Much innovation has taken place in the development of medical schools and licensure exam processes across the African continent. Still, little attention has been paid to education that enables the multidisciplinary, critical thinking needed to understand and help shape the larger social systems in which health care is delivered. Although more than half of medical schools in Canada, the United Kingdom
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Developing Disability-Focused Pre-Health and Health Professions Curricula Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Rachel Conrad Bracken, Kenneth A. Richman, Rebecca Garden, Rebecca Fischbein, Raman Bhambra, Neli Ragina, Shay Dawson, Ariel Cascio
People with disabilities (PWD) comprise a significant part of the population yet experience some of the most profound health disparities. Among the greatest barriers to quality care are inadequate health professions education related to caring for PWD. Drawing upon the expertise of health professions educators in medicine, public health, nursing, social work, and physician assistant programs, this
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Pediatric Resident Perceptions of a Narrative Medicine Curriculum Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-12-05 Raymond A. Cattaneo, Natalie González, Abby Leafe, Rachel Fleishman
Training residents to become humanistic physicians capable of empathy, compassionate communication, and holistic patient care is among our most important tasks as physician educators. Narrative medicine aims to foster those highly desirable characteristics, and previous studies have shown it to be successful in fostering self-reflection, emotional processing, and preventing burnout. We aimed to evaluate
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The Long or the Post of It? Temporality, Suffering, and Uncertainty in Narratives Following COVID-19 Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Katharine Cheston, Marta-Laura Cenedese, Angela Woods
Long COVID affects millions of individuals worldwide but remains poorly understood and contested. This article turns to accounts of patients’ experiences to ask: What might narrative be doing both to long COVID and for those who live with the condition? What particular narrative strategies were present in 2020, as millions of people became ill, en masse, with a novel virus, which have prevailed three
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COVID-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal, and Arthur Rose. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Penelope Lusk
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Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge, edited by João Biehl and Vincanne Adams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Steven P Black
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Theatre & Medicine, by Stanton B. Garner, Jr. London: Methuen Drama, 2023. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Meredith Conti
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Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity, by Helen Rhee. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2022. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Molly Ayn Jones-Lewis
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Routledge Handbook of Health and Media, by Lester D. Friedman and Therese Jones. New York: Routledge, 2022. Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Kimberly R Myers
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Illness Narratives in Popular Music: An Untapped Resource for Medical Education Journal of Medical Humanities (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-11 Andrew Childress, Monica Lou
Illness narratives convey a person’s feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and descriptions of suffering and healing as a result of physical or mental breakdown. Recognized genres include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, and films. Like poets and playwrights, musicians also use their life experiences as fodder for their art. However, illness narratives as expressed through popular music are an understudied