By Rebecca Marshall How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything. There will always be a line, a phrase; threads of words which hook onto you. For me, it was Arundhati Roy’s words above (in her latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) that weaved their […]
Category: Guest Blog Post
Primum Non Nocere: An Artist’s Perspective into the World of Medicine
This guest blog post comes from Emma Barnard, a London based visual artist specialising in lens-based media and interdisciplinary practice and research within Fine Art and Medicine. Her solo retrospective exhibition Primum Non Nocere, focuses on the patient experience. The show has its private viewing on the 15th September 18.00-21.00, and then runs from the 16th September […]
Reflections on Art, Voicelessness, and the Patient Experience
Emma Barnard MA (RCA) ‘Silence is not Golden’ ‘For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate, affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied’. Susan Sontag One […]
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 […]
First impressions only happen once
Fergus Shanahan Eyes smiling, face beaming, the porter rose from his stool to greet arrivals at the cancer centre, each nervously hesitant, staying close to a supporting loved one. With the confidence of a man who enjoyed being good at his job, he paused for those needing directions, reassured us that we were […]
Difficult Histories by Niamh NicGabhann
I was recently involved in a project which explored the histories and memories of St. Davnet’s Hospital, Monaghan. St. Davnet’s was founded as the Cavan and Monaghan District Lunatic Asylum in 1869, and its name changed to ‘Monaghan Mental Hospital’ in the late 1920s, and later to ‘St. Davnet’s Hospital’ in the 1950s. I was […]
Mark Making: An Experience of Dementia and the Arts by Hannah Zeilig
Rose sensed that I was nervous. My façade of confidence was not convincing, I was holding my papers a little too defensively across my chest and my shoulders were tense. I stood awkwardly at the edge of the circle of people, feeling outside their camaraderie. It was strange but also salutary to feel an outsider […]
The Forgiveness Project: Stories for a Vengeful Age
Images of Eva Kor embracing former SS guard, Oskar Groening, at his trial in Lueneberg this week have been shared on social media and in newspapers worldwide. These images, and the responses to them, reveal much about the complex, surprising, inspiring and challenging, sometimes even threatening, nature of forgiveness. Our relationship with forgiveness, collective and […]
Art in Arthritis by Nancy Merridew
I called Marco from the waiting room. Everyone looked waxen under the fluorescent lights of Rheumatology Clinic. His olive skin looked grey. He rose like a grapevine on the trellis – thickset but gnarled through the seasons. Marco helped his wife with her handbag and they walked together. Her gait was […]
The Man in Bed Five by Jack Garnham
I go to see the man in bed five. He winks at me. Cracked lips separate to reveal an imperfect set of yellow teeth as a wry smile spreads slowly across his face. It comes with an enormous effort. He looks worse; the burden of disease seems to weigh heavier with each passing hour. […]