The author of today’s guest blog post is Dr. Anna Magdalena Elsner, a Swiss National Science Foundation Marie Heim-Vögtlin Research Fellow working at the Center for Medical Humanities at the University of Zurich. Her current project is entitled ‘Palliative Pages’. Focusing on the history of modern palliative care in France as well as French end-of-life […]
Category: Guest Blog Post
The Feverish State and Syncretic Holism: The Re-assertion of Oral Tradition in Medicine
Oral tradition in medicine is the original form of medical treatment based on specificities and the context in which a patient is located. This tradition is fundamental to many formal and informal systems of medicine but it is highly visible in tribal medicine. The essential features of traditional healing systems have not been documented […]
A Helical Tangle
This is a guest post by Rebecca Marshall. Rebecca has just graduated from UCL Medical School, having intercalated in Global Health. She is currently undertaking an MSc in Medical Anthropology, also at UCL. Her main interests include the intersections between medical anthropology, global health and bioethics, particularly in the insight Applied Medical Anthropology can offer […]
What is Global Palliative Care When it’s at Home (or in Someone’s Home?)
This guest blog post is by Dr Guy Schofield, a palliative care registrar from the UK who is working on his PhD in Uganda funded by a Wellcome Trust Society and Ethics Fellowship. I sit here writing this in Kampala at the Institute of Hospice and Palliative Care in Africa (IHPCA), nestled in the compound […]
Why Shame, Stigma and Medicine?
Luna Dolezal and Barry Lyons introduce their special journal issue on Shame, Stigma and Medicine Shame as a research topic is enormously compelling. Everyone has experienced the pain of shame and, in some way, been shaped by that experience. Not only that, shame reveals what is most personal to us, our hopes and aspirations, while […]
Why ABC’s The Good Doctor Gets (Most of it) Right
In the first few scenes of the pilot episode of ABC’s new show, The Good Doctor, the protagonist, Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore of Bates Motel fame) saves a young boy who falls unconscious after being hit by a huge glass sign at an airport. The viewers later learn that Murphy has autism and savant […]
Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing in Brazil
This blog post comes from Dr Lisa Shaw, Reader in Brazilian Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is author of Popular Cinema in Brazil (Manchester UP, 2004) and Brazilian National Cinema (Routledge, 2007), both with Stephanie Dennison, and The Social History of Brazilian Samba (Ashgate, 1999) and Carmen Miranda (BFI-Palgrave Macmillan). She appears in the BBC4 […]
Can revalidation be a platform for praxis and the emancipation of the nursing profession?
By Catherine Kelsey, University of Bradford It is argued that nursing is controlled by a number of hegemonic influences including political reform and societal expectations, the constant call for evidence-based practice and the all-pervading management-led changes that seem to be a constant. And yet nurses are considered to be autonomous and accountable practitioners (Hilton, 2005), […]
The Venture of Medical Humanities in Turkey
In his first post for the Medical Humanities blog, Ahmet Karakaya of Istanbul University’s Medical Faculty explores the development of medical humanities education in Turkey. In Turkey, the field of medical humanities, like in many European countries, is developing rapidly. Although it seems that there are a lack of long-terms debates on bioethical discussions in […]
Moving Beyond the Debate: From Ethical Challenges to Ethical Solutions for Trainees Working in Low Income Countries
Dr Saqib Noor is the author of Surgery on the Shoulders of Giants: Letters From a Doctor Abroad. He has also discussed global surgery on the BBC Asian Network, local BBC Radio, and on Talk Radio Europe. At a recent conference on global surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a familiar […]