Medical Humanities最新文献

{"title":"Imagining bioethics with Emily Dickinson: a poetic exploration of the art of dying.","authors":"Andrea Eidsvik","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013616","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper introduces an approach to ethical inquiry inspired by Emily Dickinson's investigative poetic approach and framed by the concept of sideshadowing. The purpose of this approach is to elucidate the human experience of dying and direct our ethical attention accordingly. Sideshadowing is a concept that opens a middle realm of possibilities. Engaging with possibility through sideshadowing can guide bioethics' self-analysis of what holds and deserves attention. The bioethical response to dying is primarily focused on medical decisions and the physicality of death, which does not help us understand death as much as we think it does, nor does it meet the needs of dying people. Dickinson's poetic approach adds an investigative layer to human perception that may question what we pay attention to and add new dimensions to understandings of human reality. Dickinson shows what is possible by engaging with dying as an art.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148882223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Psychedelic renaissance in healthcare: between the biomedical and the existential.","authors":"Daniel Laforest","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013688","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this review essay I outline how the current renaissance of psychedelics in mainstream discourses about medicine is spearheaded first and foremost by profit-oriented technomedical initiatives focusing on individual wellness, and how this very situation reinforces a problematic line of demarcation between the psychopharmaceutical approach to mental health, and the more classical approach that relies on intersubjective talk therapy. It will lead me to formulate brief remarks about the unique challenges that this context presents for the field of medical humanities-specifically regarding the status of narratives in therapy and their existential implications.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148865762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evolving and contested vocabulary of abortion and miscarriage: inconsistencies across English, Italian, French and German.","authors":"Samuel Yosef","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-014343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-014343","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The language used to describe the ending of a pregnancy is contested, and the contest has consequences for stigma, recognition and access to care. In English, the late twentieth-century shift from 'spontaneous abortion' to 'miscarriage' is often told as growing compassion. Comparing English with Italian, French and German, I argue that the shift is better understood as the relocation of stigma rather than its removal. English, having no separate everyday word for miscarriage, engineered a shift through deliberate professional reform. French and German did so centuries ago. Italian never developed one and relies on a single term, <i>aborto</i>, for both miscarriage and abortion. Yet none of these words is neutral. Each locates a judgement somewhere: in the failing body, in the falseness of the loss or in a moral hierarchy of deservingness. To name a pregnancy ending is to classify it, and classification is never neutral: it takes a position on what was lost, and what was lost is precisely what remains contested. The rejection of much clinical vocabulary by people with lived experience, the emergence of new terms such as the German <i>kleine Geburt</i> ('little birth'), and live debate in France over <i>fausse couche</i> suggest that the search for adequate language is ongoing everywhere and raise the question of who is consulted. The task is not to choose better among inherited words but to keep making new ones, attentive to whose voices are present, across clinical, public and creative practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148865677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visual materialisation of loss: artistic engagements with medical data and imagery as an exploration of pregnancy and child loss.","authors":"Sofie Eleanor Layton","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-013982","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2026-013982","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Medically derived data and imagery (eg, ultrasound, CT, MRI) has the potential to open up the meaning of pregnancy and child loss beyond the diagnostic. This paper examines how such data and imagery can be subject to artistic translation and remediation as a way of exploring the complexities of grief and loss. Drawing on work within the medical humanities, the social sciences and the arts, the paper reports on how an artistic engagement with medical data and imagery can carefully and ethically be employed to explore issues of grief and loss. This is further located within an 'ethics of care' which, following Puig de la Bellacasa, treats care (of medical data, participants and audiences) as a methodological problem. I discuss three particular artworks-<i>Gestationality</i> (2022), <i>Subcutaneous</i> (2023) and <i>The Topography Table</i> (2023)-that were constituent parts of the performative installation <i>Loss is Mine and is Stored within this Body</i> (2025). In the process, I show how such concepts as haptic visuality and scale were central to the specific artistic practices and the artworks themselves, serving to open up the experience of grief and loss in the final performative installation. I conclude by suggesting that a visual and multisensory artistic practice, partly considered through a critical medical humanities' framing, can have a significant role in highlighting issues that surround pregnancy and child loss.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148799392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Resonant realities: speculating infection in the postpandemic era.","authors":"Sungmin Choi, Hyun Seon Park","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-014042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-014042","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay rethinks infection in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic by examining how its imaginaries are reconfigured in contemporary science fiction. While infection has conventionally been understood as a pathological threat to be controlled or eradicated, the pandemic asks us to reconceive it as a paradigmatic condition shaping bodily experience, social relations and ethical responsibility. This study conceptualises infection as a multilayered event that unsettles boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, and human and non-human. By re-examining the paradox of immunity and the ontological shift from clinical intrusion to a 'communizing' viral exposure, this essay argues that infection is the very ground of shared existence rather than a pathological accident. To this end, we propose a threefold analytical framework of infection-pathological, affective and ontological-and apply it to a range of science fiction texts. Zombie narratives exemplify pathological infection by staging contagion as an object of fear that justifies exclusion and immunitary violence. In comparison, the science fiction (SF) alien film <i>Arrival</i> reconfigures infection as affective contagion, where linguistic communication transforms perception and temporality, with them ethical orientation. Extending this trajectory, the SF humanoid film <i>After Yang</i> foregrounds ontological infection by depicting how memory and mourning re-embed the human within a web of techno-organic interdependence, destabilising the boundary between human and non-human existence. Ultimately, we suggest that the postpandemic future requires a shift from an immunitary logic of defence and exclusion to an <i>infectious interdependence</i> based on resonance and co-evolution.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148833423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Confronting environmental sickness: disease metaphors in ecological art.","authors":"Rebecca Blake","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-013990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-013990","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article turns to a particular mode of analogy: the deployment of medical metaphors in feminist ecological art. It foregrounds ecofeminist artworks produced from the late twentieth century onwards to demonstrate how women artists were among the first to visualise the entanglements of human and environmental health, anticipating concerns that now occupy a central place in contemporary artistic and cultural discourse. Through metaphorical representations of environmental disease, these works interrogate entrenched cultural assumptions about medicine, care, vulnerability and the imagined boundaries of the body. Drawing from the visual and material lexicon of medicine, these artists deploy images of bleeding, open wounds, pathology slides, medicine capsules and intravenous drips to frame plants and landscapes as sick or injured bodies. Moving beyond simple lamentations of environmental damage and climate change, these disease metaphors recast the ailing environment as a site where anxieties about control, permeability and responsibility converge. They expose how we narrate damage, and who and what we imagine as worthy of care, at a critical moment when the health of the planet can no longer be imagined as separate from our own.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148814297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Narrative characteristics of women with infertility on social media: a case study of Rednote.","authors":"Mengqi Jin, Lin Ma","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-013898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-013898","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>With the rise of digital media, social platforms such as Rednote (Xiaohongshu) have emerged as critical arenas for infertility patients to reconstruct illness perceptions, seek emotional compensation and reclaim their subjectivity. This study identifies the emergence of an 'affective folk knowledge system' through fragmented digital records. Rather than reflecting objective clinical deficiencies, these grass roots narratives highlight a specific perceived gap in psychosocial support from the patients' subjective perspective. Furthermore, the structural absence of male partners in these narratives underscores a deep-seated gender-role dilemma, where women continue to bear a disproportionate physical and psychological burden. The findings suggest that patient-generated online narratives should serve as a valuable supplementary tool for clinical practice. They provide doctors with insights into the deeply personal, emotional dimensions of infertility. Ultimately, the study highlights how women navigate the bias of 'feminized reproductive responsibility' by building peer solidarity, safeguarding their psychological integrity within the digital landscape.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148799427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Like a prism: making sense of coercion in contemporary psychiatry through autoethnography.","authors":"Peter Tomlinson, Evi Verbeke, Clara De Ruysscher","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013490","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article focuses on coercion in contemporary psychiatry through the autoethnographic account of Peter, a mental health peer worker who experienced psychosis and coercive psychiatric interventions. Using Peter's personal narrative and poetry as a prism, this study critically underscores the complex and multifaceted nature of coercion, which extends beyond overt methods and techniques into subtler, informal psychological pressures and systemic constraints that often go unaddressed. Peter's narrative also emphasises the harmful effects of informal coercion, particularly its links to past trauma, and how it perpetuates dynamics of power and control within psychiatric settings. His resistance to being labelled a 'chronic patient' was a crucial element in his recovery, underlining the importance of agency. Peter's poetic account bears witness to the power of creativity in processing experiences of psychosis and coercion. Overall, the study promotes a recovery-oriented and trauma-centred approach to addressing coercion in psychiatry. It calls for a transformation in psychiatric culture to reduce epistemic injustice and involve patients more authentically in their treatment and recovery processes. By co-creatively unravelling Peter's lived experiences, this article aims to foster self-reflection among mental health workers, policymakers and researchers, promoting a more compassionate, patient-centred approach to psychiatric care.This article explores the hidden and often overlooked forms of coercion in modern psychiatric care through the personal story and poetry of a mental health peer worker who has lived through psychosis and coercive treatment. His account reveals that coercion is not limited to forced hospitalisation or medication-it can also appear in subtle pressures, unspoken expectations and systemic practices that quietly undermine patient choice and agency. The narrative highlights how these informal forms of coercion can be deeply harmful, especially when they echo past traumas, reinforcing cycles of power and control within psychiatric settings. Central to the story is the author's resistance to being labelled a 'chronic patient', a stance that played a vital role in his recovery and affirmed the importance of personal agency. His poetry becomes a powerful tool for making sense of his experiences, showing how creativity can support healing. This article ultimately calls for a shift in psychiatric culture towards more compassionate, trauma-informed and patient-centred care that values lived experience, reduces harm and genuinely involves patients in shaping their own recovery. It invites mental health professionals, policymakers and researchers to reflect critically on their practices and assumptions.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148799357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Face to face: towards a philosophy of socially engaged arts in health.","authors":"Vic McEwan, Susan Coulson, Claire Hooker","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-014053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-014053","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is now an extensive and robust evidence base for arts and health, but few accounts of how or why socially engaged practices matter in ethical, experiential and aesthetic terms. This paper develops a philosophically grounded account of arts and health engagement with people whose distress is uniquely configured by the visual: those who live with facial nerve paralysis. These patients paradoxically experience hypervisibility due to their facial difference, but the resulting (often subconscious) social judgement and the profound disruption to their own sense of identity also renders them unseen. For over 4 years an experienced socially engaged artist was embedded in the multidisciplinary Sydney Facial Nerve Clinic, working with patients and clinicians through an emergent, relational practice-based artistic methodology, and eventually producing an exhibition of 15 artworks. We discuss four of these works in detail-large-scale projected portraits that superimpose patients' faces onto their clinician's hands, a surgically unravelled French horn, an oblique dialogue between surgeon and patient, and a technology infused lachrymal vase-analysing both the processes of creation and responses of participants and gallery viewers to the outcomes. We argue that both the form and effects of the practice can be understood through Emmanuel Levinas' ethical 'optics'. The processes and aesthetics of this relational, experimental and unforeclosed practice resist dominating forms of knowing. The 'site' of the work is in the open encounters in which the artist responds to the ethical responsibility of coming 'face to face' with the Other-in this case, patients and clinicians-by making themselves vulnerable to being affected through this practice. In the artistic outcomes, patients and clinicians can be seen without being reduced, and gallery visitors are kept safe while experiencing vulnerable witnessing. We suggest that rather than providing predefined and predictable benefits, the arts here become a hospitable practice of attention, uncertainty and responsibility that enables new conversations in the clinic and beyond.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148799347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing when writhing with psychosis: a computational linguistic autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky's diary.","authors":"Lena Palaniyappan, Gleb Melshin, Oliver Delgaram-Nejad, Dalia Elleuch, Alban Voppel","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-014121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-014121","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>'God of Dance' Vaslav Nijinsky wrote profusely during a short period in 1918-1919, immediately preceding his diagnosis of schizophrenia and long-term confinement. This diary, in its uncensored form, constitutes one of the most extensively documented <i>ex tempore</i> first-person accounts during psychosis. It offers a chance to explore the impact of psychosis on writing-not just on <i>what</i> one writes, but also <i>how</i> one writes under such torment. The text generates a pervasive impression of repetitive, meandering thought-invoking suspicions of being a product of <i>formal thought disorder</i>-an affliction that lies at the core of schizophrenia. We study the specific linguistic structure of this diary using computational approaches, comparing it to a word-count-matched control text composed by his wife, Romola Nijinsky, to characterise what the writing does show. Our computational analysis reveals intact topic-level discourse organisation with adequate surface-level coherence. But this apparent coherence is generated via repetition of words-indexing an inability to escape a narrow lexical repertoire-a pattern we term the <i>perseveration paradox</i> Furthermore, first-person pronoun usage was 5.45-fold higher than in the control text, and its removal reduced coherence and increased perplexity, demonstrating that the self-pronoun 'I' functioned as a <i>structural scaffold</i> for Nijinsky's thought in written text. All findings replicated on the original Russian manuscript, confirming robustness despite translation. Nijinsky's diary is not simply a document of suffering or a record of thought disorder; it is an unwitting self-portrait of a mind condensing around a fixed, narrow repertoire of words and the concepts they stand for.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148799387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}