There has been increased interest in what the philosophical subdiscipline of phenomenology can contribute to medical humanities due to its dual emphases on practicality and its attempt to understand the experience of others, thus positioning it as a potentially helpful conceptual toolkit to guide clinical care. Using various figures from the phenomenological tradition, most prominently Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber, the authors illuminate relevant philosophical concepts, employ them in various examples, and provide three principles revolving around empathy, communication, and listening (...) to patients’ individual values to guide medical professionals who practice the art of medicine in cancer care settings. (shrink)

Intergenerational storytelling (IGS) has recently emerged as an arts- and humanities-focused approach to aging research. Despite growing appeal and applications, however, IGS methods, practices, and foundational concepts remain indistinct. In response to such heterogeneity, our objective was to comprehensively describe the state of IGS in aging research and assess the critical (e.g., conceptual, ethical, and social justice) issues raised by its current practice. Six databases (PsycINFO, MEDLINE, PubMed, Scopus, AgeLine, and Sociological Abstracts) were searched using search terms relating to _age_, (...) _intergenerational_, _story_, and _storytelling_. Peer-reviewed, English-language studies conducted with participants residing in non-clinical settings were included. One thousand one hundred six (1106) studies were initially retrieved; 70 underwent full review, and 26 fulfilled all inclusion criteria. Most studies characterized IGS as a practice involving older adults (> 50 years old) and conventionally-aged postsecondary/college students (17–19 years old). Typical methodologies included oral and, in more recent literature, digital storytelling. Critical issues included inconsistently reported participant data, vast variations in study design and methods, undefined key concepts, including _younger_ vs. _older_ cohorts, _generation_, _storytelling_, and whether IGS comprised an intentional _research method_ or a retrospective _outcome_. While IGS holds promise as an emerging field of arts- and humanities-based aging research, current limitations include a lack of shared data profiles and comparable study designs, limited cross-cultural representation, and insufficiently intersectional analysis of widespread IGS practices. To encourage more robust standards for future study design, data collection, and researcher reflexivity, we propose seven evidence-based recommendations for evolving IGS as a humanities-based approach to research in aging and intergenerational relations. (shrink)

In this article, I explore Seth Farber’s critique in _The Spiritual Gift of Madness_ that the leaders of the Mad Pride movement are failing to realize his vision of the mad as spiritual vanguard of sociopolitical transformation. First, I show how, contra Farber’s polemic, several postmodern theorists are well suited for this leadership (especially the Argentinian post-Marxist philosopher Ernesto Laclau). Second, I reinterpret the first book by the Icarus Project, _Navigating the Space between Brilliance and Madness_, by reimagining its central (...) metaphor of Icarus in the context of late capitalism as a prison world. Finally, I conclude with four strategies derived therefrom for higher functioning mad leaders to transform our penitentiary world. (shrink)

The British writer John Wyndham (1903–1969) explored societal effects of surprising or mystical events. A paradigmatic example is _The Midwich Cuckoos_ (1957), which portrays identical-looking children born without sexual intercourse. I propose a reading strategy that focuses on the fictional spatial order and analyses how the construction of the children’s otherness interferes with the village’s demarcation. Furthermore, I interpret the mysterious pregnancies as a reference to basic embryo research in the 1950s – cloning. Finally, I scrutinize Wyndham’s negotiation of utilitarianism (...) throughout the novel and his critique of truly utilitarian decisions that are based on constructions of Otherness. (shrink)

Extent health humanities readings of Gabriel García Márquez’s _Love in the Time of Cholera_ have focused on the doctor-patient relationship, the physician-scientist as a model for aspiring practitioners, and how individuals relate to the novel’s health themes of death, disease, and disability. However, such medicine-focused readings neglect the population-level public health concerns of the novel as they relate to contagion, community, and quarantine. This paper contributes to the growing field of public health humanities by using a close reading method to (...) explore how the competing endemic and epidemic public health issues shape the plot and metaphors of the novel. (shrink)

In recent years, the concept of debility has gained a lot of attention. In critical theory and in the critical medical humanities, the concept has come to refer specifically to the general ill-health of ordinary lives under neoliberal capitalism; as such, it has triggered a surge of interest in large-scale affective assemblages that incapacitate multitudes of bodies. This article proposes _neoliberal misfit_ as a conceptual tool to remedy the dissolution of subjectivity in these discussions. Pushing back against Jasbir Puar specifically, (...) it argues that processes of debilitation produce a particular type of subject formation often ignored in this body of work. The article does so by distinguishing this subject formation in three contemporary illness narratives that dramatize encounters between ill bodies and accelerating rhythms, competitive atmospheres, and mobile attachments, respectively. Ultimately, the aim is to help the critical medical humanities capture how neoliberal environments affect the self-perception of people suffering from ill-health. (shrink)

HIV stigma, a social-medical problem, continues to confound researchers and health professionals, while undermining outcomes. Empathy may reduce stigma; its absence may predict stigma. This research investigates: How does Kafka’s _Metamorphosis_ advance understandings of HIV stigma in medical health education? _Metamorphosis_ amplifies the sociological-relational mechanisms fostering HIV stigma. It offers a multi-disciplinary, responsive space for ethical, humanistic and clinical inquiry to meet: enabling students to consider how social structures shape health inequities, moral, social experience, and their professional identity within. _Metamorphosis_ (...) may ultimately promote medical health humanities’ social mission—allowing literature to unfold such revelations towards greater equity in health. (shrink)

This paper examines how photography shaped the American public’s perception of psychiatric hospitals during the immediate post-WWII period. I will analyze photographs that appeared in popular exposé articles of that period and that used photography as a visual aid for disclosing the poor conditions of state hospitals, intending to promote reform efforts focused on turning antiquated asylums into modern hospitals. Existing scholarship has mentioned how these photographs had a significant influence on shaping the public’s view of asylum conditions. Through a (...) close examination of these photographs, I will argue that they often contained unintentional messages which stigmatized disabled people. (shrink)

This article tests the hypothesis that all pandemics are inherently translational. We argue that translation and translation theory can be fruitfully used to understand and manage epidemics, as they help us explore concepts of infectivity and immunity in terms of cultural and biological resistance. After examining the linkage between translation and coronavirus disease from three different yet interlinked perspectives—cultural, medical, and biocultural—we make a case for a translational medical humanities framework for tackling the multifactorial crisis brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 (...) infection. This innovative entanglement of perspectives has the merit of carving out a new space for translation research at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities, providing sustainable ways to conceptualize the production of science at times of crisis, and challenging conventional views of translation as a primarily linguistic and cultural phenomenon that traditionally does not engage with science. (shrink)

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-021-09685-3.

Language used to describe measles in the press has altered significantly over the last sixty years, a shift that reflects changing perceptions of the disease within the medical community as well as broader changes in public health discourse. California, one of the most populous U.S. states and seat of the 2015 measles outbreak originating at Disneyland, presents an opportunity for observing these changes. This article offers a longitudinal case study of five decades of measles news coverage by the Los Angeles (...) Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, which represented two of the largest news markets in California when the measles vaccine was released, in 1963, and during the 2015 outbreak. Measles reporting during this period displays patterns pointing to an active role for journalists in shaping public understanding of health and medical matters, especially as they recede from public memory, through the employment of available and circulating political and cultural frames. Moreover, journalistic frames in this period of reporting incorporated presentist descriptions of the disease, which imposed present values on the medical past, and which were constructed of decontextualized historical references that supported prevailing contemporary notions of the disease. Framing and the tendency toward presentism, in the context of shifting public health discourse, had the effect of communicating an increasingly severe sounding disease over time, and of shifting blame for that disease’s spread from nature to government to individuals. Journalistic framing and causal stories have much power to shape public understanding of medical matters as they recede from public memory. (shrink)

Through a rhetorical analysis of fragments of language used by United States public health experts, victims, and advocates during the early periods of polio, HIV and COVID-19, this project shows how constitutive rhetoric within infectious disease discourse articulates the subject position of potential victim for different publics. The author finds that the analyzed discourse simultaneously calls forth a negative identity that asks people to not become something and also asks for actions to prevent disease spread – and, in doing so, (...) the awakening of potential victim reveals hegemonic assumptions about whose bodies are valued and whose are not. (shrink)

This paper examines cancer through the lens of abjection. While cancer can be understood as an abject lifeform, we explore what we name the abject ontologies created through both cancer detection technologies/practices and cancer treatment, specifically the drug combination Adriamycin and Cytoxan. We ask: what are the abject ontologies produced through living with and living on from cancer diagnosis and treatment? Our concern is to map how cancer undoes our supposedly stable categories inherited from modernist logic, challenges our very ideas (...) of what it means to be human, and demands an ethical reorientation of public cancer discourse. (shrink)

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-021-09698-y.

Introduction. Medical trainees fear disclosing psychological distress and rarely seek help. Social sharing of difficult experiences can reduce stress and burnout. Drawing comics is one way that has been used to help trainees express themselves. The authors explore reasons why some medical trainees chose to draw comics depicting stressful situations that they had never shared with anyone before. Methods. Trainees participated in a comic drawing session on stressors in medicine. Participants were asked if they had ever shared the drawn situation (...) with anyone. Participants who had not previously shared were asked what prevented them and why they shared it now. The authors performed content analysis of the responses. Results. Of two hundred forty participants, forty-six indicated sharing an experience for the first time. Analysis of the responses revealed dedicated time and space was essential to sharing, trainee insecurity was a barrier, and comics were perceived as a safe way to communicate. Discussion. Depicting a stressful situation may be beneficial for trainees who drew an experience they had never shared before. Providing trainees with the opportunity to externalize their experience and create a community for sharing tough experiences may be one way to reduce trainee stress and burnout. (shrink)

Medical educators recognize the value of reflection for medical students and the role creative writing can play in fostering this. However, direct creative writing tasks can be challenging for many students, particularly those with limited experience in the arts and humanities. An alternative strategy is to utilize an indirect approach, engaging students with structured tasks that obliquely encourage reflection. This paper reports one such approach. We refer to this approach as in-verse reflection, playing on both the structure of the writing (...) and its novel approach to reflection. Students were invited to write, in verse-like structures, about their personal and clinical experiences as medical students. Thematic analysis of their creative outputs and reactions identified four principal themes: the challenges of life as a medical student, the emotional demands of the medical course, a sense of connectedness and solidarity with fellow students, and a sense of marginality within the hospital system. Students generally found the tasks highly engaging and conducive to reflection, producing texts representing significant insights into their experiences as medical students. The reported method offers a relatively simple, structured, and guided approach to reflective writing, adding to the repertoire of methods available to educators in the medical humanities. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical interpretive synthesis of research on the efficacy of comics in educating consumers on communicable diseases. Using this review methodology, the authors drew from empirical as well as non-empirical literature to develop a theoretical framework exploring the implications of comics’ combination of images and text to communicate this health promoting information. The authors examined selected works’ alignment with the four motivational components of Keller’s ARCS Model to evaluate research within the context of learner motivation. Findings of (...) this research indicate comics offer a useful method for providing consumer health education, particularly regarding topics that individuals may have difficulty in discussing openly. (shrink)

Due to an editing error, this article was initially published with an incorrect title. The correct title is reflected above. The original article has been corrected.

Histories of psychiatry in the United States can shed light on current areas of need in mental health research and treatment. Often, however, these histories fail to represent accurately the distinct trajectories of psychiatric care among black and white populations, not only homogenizing the historical narrative but failing to account for current disparities in mental health care among these populations. The current paper explores two parallel histories of psychiatry in the United States and the way that these have come to (...) influence current mental health practices. Juxtaposing the development of psychiatric care and understanding as it was provided for, and applied to, black and white populations, a picture of the theoretic foundations of mental health emerges, revealing the separate history that led to the current uneven state of psychiatric care. (shrink)

Medical schools, like all institutions, are conservative since they seek to maintain and expand on their accomplishments. Stakes are high in carceral medicine given the risks of replicating the inhumane social conditions that exist within prisons and allow prisons to exist. Given the increasing number of partnerships between state and municipal carceral systems with academic medical centers, medical schools must consider which guiding theory they will use to teach carceral medicine. The interdisciplinary theory of prison abolition is best fit for (...) the task of training medical students to think about the long term goals of societal change and public health. (shrink)

A culturally cultivated ignorance with regard to the care and presentation of tightly-curled hair pervades American society. This ignorance masquerades as a discourse of manageability, which supports institutional prohibitions of historically Black American hairstyles. In other words, rather than acknowledging our knowledge deficits, we attribute the medical and aesthetic consequences of our ignorance to the hair itself. The insidious implication is that the display of tightly curled hair is not a matter of taste but indicative of a lack of self-care. (...) I conclude that this trend is racially prejudicial and that laws and education are possible mechanisms of redress. (shrink)

I apply Gloria Anzaldúa’s “borderlands theory” to Jamie Cortez’s Sexile, an HIV/AIDS prevention publication created as a first-person narrative of the journey of queer, trans activist Adela Vasquez who fled to the US from Cuba in 1980. I argue that Sexile is a borderlands text and operationalizes Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness at various levels— ranging from the essence of the text and what its existence represents to the literary techniques used in the telling of Adela’s narrative. In the first half of (...) this paper, I explore Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory and the ethos of Sexile as a text, including Vázquez’s story as inherently a borderland narrative; as a product of democratized knowledge; the praxis of the text’s creation; and the technology of the graphic novel. Throughout the second half, I look more closely at the content of the text using close reading to explore notions of the “borderland” represented throughout Adela’s narrative. Through both its content and the praxis of creation, Sexile represents the power of graphic medicine in illustrating the nuances of narratives at the interstices of marginalized identities and captures the multitudes and ambiguities of trauma, loss, rebirth, kinship, and joy at the margins. (shrink)

This collaborative essay experimentally applies the insights of Mary Shelley's 1818 gothic fantasy Frankenstein to clinical interactions between present-day physicians and the patients they, akin to Shelley's human protagonist, so often seem to bring to life. Because that process is frequently fraught with unspoken elements of ambivalence, disappointment, frustration, and failure, we find in Shelley's speculative fiction less a cautionary tale of overreach than a dynamic parable of the role that the unspoken, the invisible, and the unknown might play in (...) contemporary physician/patient relationships. Playing with that parable, we consider its relevance to four often unacknowledged dynamics that shape physician/patient interaction: commitment to a false binary of life and death; the tyranny of normative aesthetics; shared negative affect; and the ethics of care and care-denial. To "speak with Frankenstein" is, we show, to make space for the otherwise unspeakable. The result is a more complete model of narrative medicine that accommodates to its ideal of open communication and full attention the persistence of what cannot be said, seen, or known--only imagined and approximated. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between medicine’s history and its digital present through the lens of the physician-patient relationship. Today the rhetoric surrounding the introduction of new technologies into medicine tends to emphasize that technologies are disturbing relationships, and that the doctor-patient bond reflects a more ‘human’ era of medicine that should be preserved. Using historical studies of pre-modern and modern Western European medicine, this article shows that patient-physician relationships have always been shaped by material cultures. We discuss three activities (...) – recording, examining, and treating – in the light of their historical antecedents, and suggest that the notion of ‘human medicine’ is ever-changing: it consists of social attributions of skills to physicians that played out very differently over the course of history. (shrink)

The authors would like to correct a misspelling in the name of one of the authors due to a typographical error. The name should read Atur Turakhia, not Artur Turakhia. This does not change the conclusions or interpretations presented.

This essay examines the theory of maternal impressions, the belief that a woman’s experiences or emotions during pregnancy could explain congenital disability or emotional/ behavior differences in her child and asks why this theory circulated as an explanation for disability seen at birth by both medical doctors and in literature for far longer than it did across the Atlantic. By presenting examples from nineteenth-century medical literature, popular fiction, maternal handbooks, and two canonical works of literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (...) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave, I argue that maternal impressions worked to maintain anxiety for women, and particular white women, to ensure they felt responsible if anything was “wrong” with their child. Ultimately, I show how maternal impressions was both an ableist and racialized understanding of inheritance that wouldn’t be discarded until the emergence of eugenics in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

Tragedy is a founding theme in disability studies. Critical disability studies have, since their inception, argued that understandings of disability as tragedy obscure the political dimensions of disability and are a barrier facing disabled persons in society. In this paper, we propose an affirmative understanding of tragedy, employing the philosophical works of Nietzsche, Spinoza and Hasana Sharp. Tragedy is not, we argue, something to be opposed by disability politics; we can affirm life within it. To make our case, we look (...) to an ongoing ethnography of two Canadian children’s rehabilitation clinics. Looking to the clinical experience of Canadian boys and young men diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and those of their families, we show how this affirmative understanding of tragedy allows us to pursue the themes of disability politics within tragedy. Contrary to an optimism that would eschew tragedy at all costs or a pessimistic approach that declines to act in the face of tragic circumstance, we argue that a revised understanding of tragedy allows us to situate the occasionally-tragic clinical experience of disability in a philosophy of life. Both disability and tragedy point us to the shared entanglements that make life what it is. (shrink)

The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of thirty-seven issues of The DDU Review, a newsletter produced by residents of the Dual Diagnosis Unit, a residential unit for people who had diagnoses of developmental disability and serious mental illness in the Central State Hospital. The analysis of the newsletters produced between September 1988 and June 1992 revealed three major themes: 1) the mundane; 2) good behavior; and 3) advocacy. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, the discourse of medicalization—such as relations with physicians, (...) diagnoses, and medications—receive little attention. Instead, the patient-journalists focus on prosaic aspects of institutional life. The patients used their writing as a form self-definition and advocacy. The authors argue that even though it is tempting to consider the patients’ emphasis on good behavior as evidence of institutional control, internalized discipline, and medicalization, a more nuanced interpretation, which focuses on how the patients’ understood their own experiences, is warranted. Researchers must also recognize the ways in which The DDU Review reveals the patient-journalists’ experience of an institutional life that includes non-medical staff, varied social relationships among patients, and negotiated freedoms. (shrink)

Reality TV is immensely popular, and various shows in this media genre involve a storyline of infertility and infertility treatment. Feminists argue that normative and constructed realities about infertility and infertility treatment, like those in reality TV, are central to the emancipation of women. Such realities are able to steer viewers' perceptions of the world. This article examines the emancipatory significance of representations of women on 'infertility reality TV shows'. While the women in these shows all have 'abnormal' qualities, we (...) consider their portrayal as figurations of monstrosity. In the literature, monstrosity is understood as a way to challenge nonemancipatory norms by offering an alternative identity. Through a content analysis of seven reality TV shows, we identified four types of in/fertile monsters: the cyborg, the freak, the abject, and the childless. We show that these monsters are predominantly non-emancipatory as they all involve mechanisms of altering, excluding, or condemning infertility in relation to what is considered normal and acceptable womanhood. Therefore, at the end of this article, we make a plea for more diverse and emancipatory representations of infertile women in popular culture. (shrink)

Culture can broadly be defined as “the values, norms, and assumptions that guide human action”. In contrast with the broader civilian society, the experiences and environments within the military community create a unique cultural subset. The United States armed forces are unified by their primary mission to provide external defense, security, and protection, and each branch shares a unique core set of values and norms. Because this culture is so complex and unique, it can sometimes be a challenge for many (...) civilian professionals to work with this community, so having a strong competency in understanding military culture, as well as knowledge of specific conflicts and wars, one is not only able to begin to understand the lives and personalities of our soldiers but also able to recognize that this culture aids in survival. This paper will demonstrate and discuss the importance of competency in military culture when practicing music therapy or other interdisciplinary approaches within the process of group therapy with veterans. Other topics covered will include: issues of social transmission as it relates to transitioning into civilian society; the importance of being a witness to veterans’ stories; and facilitators’ ethical responsibilities when working with this population. (shrink)

“Toba Tek Singh,” which describes the exchange of mental asylum inmates between India and Pakistan in the wake of partition, was perhaps Saadat Hasan Manto’s most well-known short story. Manto’s work was coloured by his experience of mental illness, including alcohol addiction and possible depressive disorder. This essay attempts to use “Toba Tek Singh” as a lens through which to shine an integrative light on the role of mental illness in Manto’s work and life, by discussing his personal experiences, themes (...) of mental illness in the story, and the implications of his writing in the historical context of post-partition South Asia. (shrink)

“Toba Tek Singh,” which describes the exchange of mental asylum inmates between India and Pakistan in the wake of partition, was perhaps Saadat Hasan Manto’s most well-known short story. Manto’s work was coloured by his experience of mental illness, including alcohol addiction and possible depressive disorder. This essay attempts to use “Toba Tek Singh” as a lens through which to shine an integrative light on the role of mental illness in Manto’s work and life, by discussing his personal experiences, themes (...) of mental illness in the story, and the implications of his writing in the historical context of post-partition South Asia. (shrink)

“Toba Tek Singh,” which describes the exchange of mental asylum inmates between India and Pakistan in the wake of partition, was perhaps Saadat Hasan Manto’s most well-known short story. Manto’s work was coloured by his experience of mental illness, including alcohol addiction and possible depressive disorder. This essay attempts to use “Toba Tek Singh” as a lens through which to shine an integrative light on the role of mental illness in Manto’s work and life, by discussing his personal experiences, themes (...) of mental illness in the story, and the implications of his writing in the historical context of post-partition South Asia. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists ascribed to a model of health that was predicated on the existence of objective and strictly defined laws of nature. The allegedly “natural” rules governing the production of consumption of food, however, were structured by a set of distinctively bourgeois moral values that demonized over-indulgence and intemperance, encouraged self-discipline and productivity, and treated gentility as an index of social worth. Accordingly, the asylum acted not only as a therapeutic instrument but also as a moral machine that was designed (...) to remake lazy, indolent transgressors into useful, “decorous” citizens. Because the theory and mechanics underlying this machine seemed straightforward and self-evident to psychiatrists, they were confounded when the asylum failed to translate its ideals into reality. While psychiatrists tended to blame this failure on the intractable immorality and weakness of individual patients, particularly paupers and immigrants, a review of the various meanings and uses of food in the hospital reveals the fault lines that ran through the asylum’s ideological structure. (shrink)

PurposeMedical humanities is a field which implies collaborative work across disciplines although the degree to which this actually occurs is unknown. Our purpose was to determine the degree of joint work in medical humanities through analysis of authorship and acknowledgements in the two main medical humanities journals.MethodsObservational survey of authorship. We studied authorship data in all papers published in the two major general medical humanities journals between 2009 and 2018.ResultsTwo-thirds of papers had single authors, of whom a majority declared a (...) single disciplinary affiliation. The titles of 60.8% of papers explicitly suggested collaborative content of which 19.9% had multiple authors from more than one discipline ; of the remainder, almost half had a single, single-disciplinary author. One-third of papers referenced one or more people in the acknowledgements. Among papers whose titles suggested humanities or medical content only, authorship lists of 10.2% and 17.9% respectively demonstrated collaborative scholarship.ConclusionsDespite considerable involvement from both humanities and medical practitioners, there is still substantial scope for enhanced emphasis on collaborative seminars and exchanges in the medical humanities and editorial policies to promote transparency of the nature of collaborative work among disciplines. Journal editors and editorial boards should reflect on the opportunity to promote enhanced visibility of joint work in scholarship in the medical humanities through reflection and review of current editorial policies. (shrink)

Since the late 1990s, the use of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy to treat unilateral breast cancer has been on the rise. Over the past two decades, dozens of studies have been conducted in order to understand this trend, which has puzzled and frustrated physicians who find it at odds with efforts to curb the surgical overtreatment of breast cancer, as well as with evidence-based medicine, which has established that the procedure has little oncologic benefit for most patients. Based on the work (...) of Annemarie Mol and John Law, this paper argues that these efforts to understand increased CPM use are limited by the “epistemology problem” in medicine, or, in other words, the tendency to view healthcare controversies and decision making exclusively through the lenses of objective and subjective forms of knowledge. Drawing on public discourse about rationales for choosing CPM, we argue that this surgical trend cannot adequately be understood in terms of what doctors and patients know about breast cancer risk and how CPM affects that risk. In addition, it must be recognized as the outcome of how specific practices of screening, detection, and treatment do or enact the bodies of patients, producing tensions in their lives that cannot be remedied with better or better communicated information. Recognizing the embodied realities of these enactments and their effects on patient decision making, we maintain, is essential for physicians who want to avoid the paternalism that haunts breast cancer treatment in the US. (shrink)

In this article we examine the figure of the doctor in animated debates around public sector medicine in contemporary South Africa. The loss of health professionals from the South African public system is a key contributor to the present healthcare crisis. South African medical schools have revised curricula to engage trainee doctors with a broader set of social concerns, but the disjunctures between training, health systems failures, and a high disease burden call into question whether junior doctors are adequately prepared (...) or whether conditions of care extend beyond medical training. A concern with 'resilience' suggests a correct ethical relation to a putative obligation to provide care in a struggling system. By examining the ways in which trainee doctors are expected to 'cope' with the demands of medical practice, to adopt the correct moral posture in relation to the urgency of care, and to enact a desirable ethical relation to the broader social and political context of medical practice, we examine the picture of humanist concern that animates the subjectivities and techniques of the self called for by this training, and advocate for endurance as an alternative framework for understanding the political and ethical relations between doctors, patients and health systems. (shrink)

In this article I consider the role of passing and performance in the everyday lives of alkaptonuria and vitiligo patients. Race, LGBTQ, gender and disability scholars have long used the term passing to describe sub-groups of people within marginal populations who intentionally manipulate their bodies or alter their behaviour in order to claim identities that are not socially assigned to them at birth. In this paper I demonstrate the effectiveness of the passing strategies that patients use in order to mitigate (...) their disease symptoms and render them invisible, thus enabling them to pass as “healthy” or unaffected by their condition. I further consider how patients who choose not to pass utilise resistance strategies in order to generate awareness of their disease and encourage funding for it. I conclude by assessing the effectiveness of these strategies in determining whether or not patients can pass, and the ways in which this is aided or hindered by their social and economic status. (shrink)

This essay applies Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space, particularly his conceptualization of the tension formed by the perceived-conceived-lived triad to analyze how space is produced in wartime hospitals as demonstrated in Richard Selzer’s “The Whistlers’ Room.” Wounded soldiers participate in producing the triad of the social space of military hospitals through their multilayered performances as fighting soldiers serving the nation and as living human beings longing for human connections. Contradictory performances demonstrate the strategic positioning of wounded soldiers (...) as active producers of different social spaces. By representing the lived spaces produced by wounded soldiers, Selzer challenges the hegemonic representations of the conceived spaces of military hospitals. Selzer’s exploration of soldiers’ contradictory performances opens up opportunities for discussion of writing physicians who assume a similar role by positioning themselves strategically within the medical institution. (shrink)

Comics has always had a critical engagement with socio-political and cultural issues and hence evolved into a medium with a subversive power to challenge the status quo. Staying true to the criticality of the medium, graphic medicine critiques the exploitative and unethical practices in the field of healthcare, thereby creating a critical consciousness in the reader. In close reading select graphic pathographies such as Gabby Schulz's Sick, Emily Steinberg's Broken Eggs, Ellen Forney's Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me and Marisa (...) Marchetto's Cancer Vixen, the present article delineates how graphic medicine interrogates the larger than life forces in the field of healthcare. Drawing specific instances from the aforementioned graphic texts, the essay demonstrates that graphic medicine scrutinizes the political economy of health under capitalism. In so doing, the article illustrates how the pharmaceutical corporations, insurance companies, medical technology, and healthcare corporations marketize and commoditize health in the neoliberal era. Finally, the article attempts to theorize how graphic pathographies, mediating subjective experiences, generate a new critical literacy through the conflation of the personal and the political in the verbovisual medium of comics. (shrink)

Direct-to-consumer television advertisements for Lyrica in the United States create narratives of gendered domestic normalcy to which women with fibromyalgia are encouraged to aspire through pharmaceutical intervention. This paper unpacks images and narratives within these advertisements to demonstrate that they rely on metaphors that represent gendered expectations in order to evoke guilt and provoke a desire for what Joseph Dumit calls “health as risk reduction,” and what I argue is an attempt to show disability being erased. Following Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding (...) model of communication, viewers play a role in constructing societal expectations for women with chronic pain and for themselves. (shrink)

A number of studies show that when doctors become ill, there is often ambiguity in the division of roles and responsibilities in the medical encounter. Yet little is known about how the dilemma of the sick doctor has changed over time. This article explores the experience of illness among physicians by applying an historical, narratological approach to three doctor’s narratives about personal cases of cardiac disease: Max Pinner’s from the 1940s, Robert Seaver’s from the 1980s, and John Mulligan’s from 2015. (...) Drawing on Erving Goffman’s principles of social interaction, I argue that part of the challenge in the analysed narratives is because when doctors seek medical attention for themselves, the ensuing medical ‘drama’ suffers. I compare the three narratives to argue that the experience of becoming a patient while simultaneously remaining a doctor is a challenge that has changed over time. In Pinner’s narrative, the patient identity is both undesirable and inaccessible; in Seaver’s, role ambivalence between doctor and patient is the most salient feature; for Mulligan, his personal rather than professional experience of illness is the overarching theme of the narrative. Finally, I suggest that an awareness of how the medical drama often changes when doctors are patients might prove beneficial both for the doctor-patients and providers of medical care. (shrink)