Medicine Unboxed is an annual one-day conference which brings together an inspirational blend of expertise in health care, philosophy, ethics, law, sociology, politics, art, film, and literature. The aim of the this year’s conference, held in October, was to explore medicine’s values through the lens of the arts and humanities; considering medical practice and policy […]
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James Poskett: Stories of psychology
Who are the big names in the history of child psychology? Anna Freud? Melanie Klein? John Bowlby? Certainly. But, according to Professor Sally Shuttleworth, in order to locate the origins of child psychology, we have to look to nineteenth-century literature, to authors such as George Eliot and Charles Dickens. This is just one of the […]
Ian Williams: Graphic Medicine: Visualising the Stigma of Illness: Ian Williams
The contribution of the medium of comics (referred to in the plural to denote both the physical printed object and the attendant philosophy) to medical discourse has begun, over the past few of years, to be explored by academics interested in illness narrative, patient experience and healthcare education. Autobiographical comics and graphic novels authored by […]
A Poem ‘On the Dying of Amy Winehouse’ by Dan Moran
Among us, there are those who will not make it. Those who will contend with mortality, Wrapping themselves around it, Unable to let go. We watch them as prey through a sight. Cheer them as the mob below, Looking up at the man on the ledge. We are unsure what to hope for. We stand […]
James Poskett: Abandoning disease
Imagine you are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Your weight loss, lethargy and occasionally-blurred vision are all finally explained and your treatment, regular injections of insulin, prescribed. A month later you go back to your doctor. They open their clinical handbook, flick through the index and, rather unfortunately, ‘diabetes’ has been omitted from the latest […]
Ayesha Ahmad: The Story of Existence – Reflections on the 14th International Philosophy and Psychiatry Conference, Gothenburg.
Can you treat a person’s story? At present, amid the setting of the 14th International Philosophy and Psychiatry conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, I am not alone in trying to peer through the looking-glass, searching for the heart of the humanity in medicine, and for a treasure, that will surely tell us what we should find […]
James Poskett: Retrospective diagnosis – it’s not (all) bad
Did Julius Caesar suffer from epilepsy? Was Mad King George mad? Did Tutankhamun have Klippel-Feil syndrome? Retrospective diagnosis, particularly of notable historical figures, makes me feel uneasy. For one, it seems to fly in the face of contemporary historiography in which diseases are recognised as influenced by the social, historical and linguistic context. Even the […]
James Poskett: Storytelling in the theatre
Telling the Patient’s Story details a theatre company’s attempts to develop medical students’ case presentation skills. Workshops, covering everything from improvisation, personal monologues and body language, had a marked effect on the students, with all participants agreeing that the training improved their delivery of patient histories. http://mh.bmj.com/content/37/1/18.abstract So, the arts and humanities can help medical […]
Ayesha Ahmad: ‘Medicine and Metaphors; Writing from the heart’
Since the time of Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physician, who is regarded as the “Father of Medicine,” medicine and the humanities have been interwined with all human beings in all cultures through a shared and common desire to heal. Sometimes though, the very fatality and mortality that gives rise to our existential meanings; our ethereal […]
Ayesha Ahmad: On ‘Mask:Mirror:Membrane’, an exhibition by Deborah Padfield
A recent viewing at the Menier Gallery of Deborah Padfield’s ‘Mask: Mirror: Membrane’ exhibition of images produced from experiences of facial pain, plunged my own experience into that of the perceiver of pain. In collaboration with Professor Joanna Zakrzewska, facial pain patients, and clinicians from UniversityCollege London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Deborah Padfield asked an […]