The Reading Room: Reading for Health

    Erika Wright. Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2016)   Reviewed by Dr Jane Darcy, Department of English, University College London   Erika Wright begins Reading for Health with a timely reminder for Victorianists, quoting Ruskin’s argument about the dangerous temptation of the ‘phenomenon of the sick-room’ for […]

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The Reading Room: Salka Valka

  Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness: she needs to be alone   Reviewed by David S. Baldwin, Professor of Psychiatry Clinical and Experimental Sciences Academic Unit Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton, United Kingdom Email:  dsb1@soton.ac.uk   Born in Reykjavík in April 1902, Halldór Guðjónsson (he changed his name to Halldór Kiljan Laxness in 1923) […]

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The Reading Room: ‘Making Medical Knowledge’

  Making Medical Knowledge By Miriam Solomon Oxford University Press, 2015   Reviewed by Dr Jonathan Fuller, University of Toronto   We should forgive anyone unfamiliar with recent trends in ‘scientific medicine’ for thinking that within scientific medicine there are now multiple medicines to choose from: evidence-based medicine (EBM), translational medicine, narrative medicine, personalized medicine, […]

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The Reading Room: ‘Deaf Gain’

  Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, Editors University of Minnesota Press, 2014   Reviewed by Dr Paul Dakin, GP Trainer in North London with research interest in the representation of d/Deaf people   This book challenges the commonly held notion that deafness is an existence […]

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