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Medical Humanities is a Plan S compliant Transformative Journal. Medical Humanities is led by Dr Brandy Schillace, the journal publishes scholarly and critical articles on a broad range of topics. These include history of medicine, cultures of medicine, disability studies, gender and the body, communities in crisis, bioethics, and public health.
The ‘Glasgow effect’: the controversial cultural life of a public ...
The question of why more people in Glasgow were dying, and younger, compared with English cities with almost identical levels of deprivation, was a hot topic in Scottish public health debates in the early 21st century. Public health researchers, particularly the Glasgow Centre of Population Health (GCPH), used the terms ‘Glasgow effect’ and ‘Scottish effect’ as placeholders while ...
Eggs, sugar, grated bones: colour-based food preferences in …
In 1913, eccentric French composer Erik Satie wrote a fragmentary, diary-like essay where he depicted a strikingly rigid diet consisting solely of white foods: eggs, sugar, coconuts, rice, cream cheese, fuchsia juice and so on. Satie’s brief essay has later been used as one of many puzzle pieces in attempts to retrospectively diagnose him with …
Lessons from the past: preventive medicine in early modern England
The history of English medicine used to consist of chronicles of medical progress and great ideas culminating in twentieth century biomedicine. Unlike earlier generations whose medical beliefs and practices were seen to be both futile and dangerous, modern medicine was thought to be able to eradicate illness with a “magic bullet”. During the later part of …
Before compassion: sympathy, tact and the history of the ideal …
The word ‘compassion’ is ubiquitous in modern healthcare. Yet few writers agree on what the term means, and what makes it an essential trait in nursing. In this article, I take a historical approach to the problem of understanding compassion. Although many modern writers have assumed that compassion is a universal and unchanging trait, my research reveals …
Neurodiversity and disability: what is at stake? - Medical Humanities
Neurodiversity has come hugely to the fore in recent years in a variety of contexts, and is now subject to academic debate, activist discussion, and increasingly embedded in a range of institutional and corporate settings in the Global North, from workplaces to early years education, from psychotherapy to mainstream political discourses. The term has gained traction in Medical Humanities, as ...
Of not passing: homelessness, addiction, mental health and care …
People experiencing homelessness in the UK were unconditionally offered housing (and support) from the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020. For many, that meant ‘(re)entering’ the support system and having a chance to ‘move on’ to longer-term housing. This beneficial effect of some of the policy reactions to the pandemic on people …
Intrusion of the other: identity, ethics and transplantation in Sui ...
This essay examines the profound themes and complex narratives presented in Sui Ishida’s Tokyo Ghoul , focusing on the illegal xenotransplantation and the transformation of the protagonist, Ken Kaneki, as he undergoes ghoulification. It delves into concerns surrounding patient autonomy and the integrity of medical procedures within organ transplantation, raising thought-provoking questions ...
In the vast field of bioethics, the past three decades have seen several publications of mono-graphs, edited volumes and academic papers on bioethics from African perspectives. Leading figures like Tangwa (2019), Atuire (2019) Behrens (2017), Andoh (2011), Metz (2010a) and Gbadegesin (1993) have argued for an African framework of bioethics.
Towards a translational medical humanities: introducing the …
In this introductory essay, we will present a translational medical humanities approach where the humanities are not only an auxiliary to medical science and practice, but also an interdisciplinary space where both medicine and the humanities mutually challenge and inform each other. First, we explore how medicine’s attempt to tackle the nature–culture divide …