Julia Roberts meets Sigmund Freud in Goa: A review of Dear Zindagi, directed by Gauri Shinde, India 2016, 4* Currently in general release in UK cinemas Reviewed by Dr Khalid Ali, Screening room editor Bollywood cinema has secured its international box-office appeal with a well known formula of combining action, melodrama, song, and dance in […]
Latest articles
Global Humanities: Talking Taboo
When Talking is Taboo by Ayesha Ahmad In this piece, I want to talk about what it was like to be a panellist at a recent event strategically entitled “Talking Taboo” at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I spoke for ten minutes; ten minutes that represented a life time. I began the introduction […]
Politics and Medicine
Clinicians should understand how they can use the ballot box to advance their patients’ health interests. Jacob King, Deniz Kaya Medical Students, Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry As a health professional working in a sterile environment one might easily find themselves feeling disparately removed from the slimy world of politics. But sadly we […]
Global Humanities: On Being Invisible
Ines Ongenda – A Personal Reflection In September 2015 I started a Master of Science in Global Health and Development at a leading UK institution. My background was in biological sciences and I was your typical aspiring medical doctor who had a strong interest in global health and wanted to explore and learn […]
Film review: Mannequin
The Banality of Evil – Review of Mannequin, Egypt, 2015, directed by Dr Mina Elnaggar Reviewed by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York Mannequin is a short, terrifying film with ambitions as large as its 7-minute running time is brief. The action starts immediately: An unnamed man who must […]
Book Review: A Smell of Burning
A Smell of Burning By Colin Grant London: Jonathan Cape, 2016 Reviewed by Dr Maria Vaccarella, University of Bristol Colin Grant’s A Smell of Burning conveys a powerful message: being diagnosed with epilepsy means being associated with an intricate and captivating cultural history. Patients and families are connected to centuries of […]
Poetry Book Review: Owen Lewis’s Best Man
Best Man by Owen Lewis. Dos Madres press, 2015 Reviewed by Wendy French. Best Man has just been awarded first prize in the Jean Pedrick Chapbook prize from the New England Poetry Club. When you read the poems you can certainly understand why Lewis’s work has received this recognition. Edward Hirsch’s epigraph features at the […]
Symposium – Retroviral Cultures: AIDS, Twenty Years On
1 December 2016, 2.00 PM – 6.00 PM Andrew Blades, Maria Vaccarella, Corinne Squire, MK Czerwiec Old Council Chamber, Wills Memorial Building 2016 marks the twentieth anniversary of the 11th International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, at which Taiwanese American researcher David Ho and his team revealed new antiretroviral combination therapies to the world. […]
Science Fiction Book Review: Spaceship Medic
The theme for the next issue of Medical Humanities is Science Fiction. There are many online articles already available on the theme (see Related Reading below). A Spaceship in Trouble: Reflections on Harry Harrison’s Spaceship Medic. Puffin books, 1976 Kindle version currently available Reviewed by Matthew Castleden Lieutenant Donald Chase, a […]
Book review: Is Literature Healthy?
Is Literature Healthy? by Josie Billington. Published by Oxford University Press, 2016. Reviewed by Dr Neil Vickers Many years ago, I blagged a ticket to an invitation-only symposium on the subject of medicine and narrative, held under the auspices of what was then the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The premise […]