Jane Austen’s lifelong health problems and final illness: New …
Jane Austen is typically described as having excellent health until the age of 40 and the onset of a mysterious and fatal illness, initially identified by Sir Zachary Cope in 1964 as Addison’s disease. Her biographers, deceived both by Cassandra Austen’s destruction of letters containing medical detail, and the cheerful high spirits of the existing letters, have seriously underestimated ...
Disease, illness, sickness, health, healing and wholeness: exploring ...
Concepts such as disease and health can be difficult to define precisely. Part of the reason for this is that they embody value judgments and are rooted in metaphor. The precise meaning of terms like health, healing and wholeness is likely to remain elusive, because the disconcerting openness of the outlook gained from experience alone resists the reduction of …
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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 ...
Living happily alone in Plato’s cave? On loneliness, technology and …
In a lot of research on loneliness and technology, there is an underlying premise that actual, physical presence is more real than ‘virtual’ presence. This premise is rarely explicit, yet it implies a hierarchy of reality, where the ‘here and now’ is always on top. In this theoretical paper, we examine this latent hierarchy and the understandings of presence and mediation it implies ...
Principlism or narrative ethics: must we choose between them?
This paper addresses a current debate in the bioethics community between principlists, who consider that principles are at the heart of moral life, and narrativists, who see communication at its core. Using a case study entitled “The forgetful mourner” to introduce the tensions between each of these positions, I go on to explain the central …
It bears witness to their expressions of pain and frustrations with assessment, and places their literary narratives in dialogue with biomedical accounts of the pain assessment methods which they critique. To this end, the article will briefly engage with clinical texts, including Ronald Melzack and Turk (2011), Pasero and McCaffery (2011), and ...
Critical medical humanities: embracing entanglement, taking risks
What can a critical medical humanities achieve? Clinicians, researchers, healthcare workers, artists and many others who routinely engage with or contribute to the medical humanities may despair that this is yet another attempt to define the medical humanities,1–4 whether it is taken to be a discipline or a field of enquiry, or as a set of interventions, shared …
About - Medical Humanities
Medical Humanities presents the international conversation around medicine and its engagement with the humanities and arts, social sciences, health policy, medical education, patient experience and the public at large. Led by Dr Brandy Schillace, the journal publishes scholarly and critical articles on a broad range of topics. These include history …
On Sonder - Medical Humanities
Beyond the contents of this issue of the journal, sonder is a word that captures the essence of medical humanities work. It recognises, values and appreciates the unique subjective experience of individuals whilst acknowledging the relational context in which we all live, both in health and in illness. It is an area of inquiry that is concerned ...