To those teaching and researching the medical humanities, major exhibitions of great art represent a wonderful opportunity for a focal illumination of how medicine and the arts interact. However, for those who live a long way from the great galleries, the excellence of the writing and insights in the many reviews—including those in medical journals—are […]
Although Valentine’s Day is often criticised as a cynical creation of florists and the greeting cards industry, it is a useful focal point for considering love and sexuality as elements of human wellbeing that often escape attention in healthcare. This neglect is most marked for later life, when popular discourse on late life romance is […]
Little in human nature escapes the scrutiny of scholarship, and New Year resolutions are no exception. We tap into a tradition that dates back to Babylonian times. Their new year began in March with the sowing of the crops: in ancient Roman times this shifted to January, associated with Janus, the two faced god who […]
One of the great challenges of progress in the medical humanities is that of time and space. Interested clinicians tend not to work in the arts blocks of universities, and humanities scholars rarely frequent clinical settings. The hard graft of interdisciplinary research is ever more elusive without the opportunity to mingle, discuss, and challenge. Our […]
A live telecast of The Marriage of Figaro to a baseball stadium from the Kennedy Centre provided a delightful and illuminating synergy with the 2016 conference of the National Centre for Creative Ageing in Washington DC. After attending the conference’s opening reception at an exhibition of art by older people, we had a short walk to this […]
Carinthia is a fascinating corner of Austria, formally included in the new Austrian Republic in a plebiscite in 1919 and imbued with the confluence of Austrian, Slovenian, and Italian cultures. Packed with history and culture, it provided rich material for underpinning a keynote lecture for the Austrian Geriatrics and Gerontology Society conference in Villach on how […]
Asked to do a column on medical education for an Irish newspaper, I was struck by how little professional debate we have had on the extraordinary increase in student intakes in these islands. Traditionally Ireland has had a large number of medical schools proportionate to its population: recent presentations in the Royal Colleges of Physicians […]
In the last month I have had two wonderful musical experiences in Dublin, each causing me to reflect on one of the key challenges of medicine, that of getting to the core of what is troubling people who seek medical attention. Each of the performances was from music ensembles who seek to perform music in […]
One of the greatest challenges for us as we age is “bar stool gerontology.” For most complex subjects—nuclear physics, molecular biology, or philosophy—most of us recognise that some learning and education are required to grasp their fundamentals. Yet despite the fact that we are at our most complex in later life, it remains acceptable in […]
Exams and the pre Christmas rush notwithstanding, a triple-line party whip was in force within the family for the midnight first screening of Star Wars, The Force Awakens. Sitting in the back row of a packed, expectant, and goodnatured cinema, I was struck by the number of contemporaries also attending with adult and teen children. […]