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 …
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 ...
Homepage | Medical Humanities
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.
Love as delusion, delusions of love: erotomania, narcissism and …
Erotomania has a long, colourful history in psychiatry. It is a rare condition in which the patient (‘subject’) develops the belief that he or she is loved from afar by another person (‘object’). The subject is generally female, though men predominate in forensic samples. The object is generally perceived to belong to a higher social class, reflecting a sociopolitical element in the ...
Knock: a study in medical cynicism - Medical Humanities
Abstract. French literature has shown an enduring fascination with the social figure of the doctor. In Jules Romains' amusing play Knock (1922), and in its later film version (1951), the doctor as deceiver returns to centrestage with a flourish. Molière's seventeenth-century figures were mostly quacks and mountebanks; Knock is something new: he is a health messiah.
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 ...
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 …
Transcendence and healing - Medical Humanities
Transcendence promotes healing by altering or cultivating beliefs that can modulate the body’s response to pain or make sense of pain. This in turn can produce an emotional response that enables people to cope with chronic or terminal illness. I explain transcendence in terms of a monistic rather than dualistic conception of mind and body ...
Bibliotherapy in practice: a person-centred approach to using …
Bibliotherapy is the use of texts to provide support for people with mental and physical health problems. It is widely seen to have beneficial outcomes but there is still disagreement about how best to deliver bibliotherapy in practice. This article explores one method of delivering bibliotherapy which has evolved over the past 20 years in the North of England, the Kirklees approach. Using a ...
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 ...