{"title":"Relevance of Georg Grosz's Weimar-era drawings to promoting social justice and health equity in contemporary society.","authors":"Eberechukwu Akadinma, Dennis Raphael","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013132","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013132","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The arts and humanities can direct attention to the health-threatening effects of adverse living and working conditions and the political and economic systems that spawn them. Most of these efforts aim to improve healthcare by promoting empathy and sensitivity among health professionals towards patients and improving clinical skills. However, less effort is devoted towards improving living and working conditions-the structural and social determinants of health-that cause illness and make managing illness difficult. Using the arts and humanities to suggest how society could be changed to promote health is even less common, especially in regard to our economic system of capitalism. In this paper, we consider how the acerbic art of Georg Grosz, which critiqued the political, economic and social life of Weimar-period Germany, may find renewed relevance to the contemporary scene in Canada and other nations under the thrall of neoliberal approaches to governance. We suggest that Grosz's art can be a rich stimulus for promoting social justice and health equity through reflection and discussion, research, and then action to direct attention to how living and working conditions threaten health and how the economic and political systems that create these health-threatening conditions can be reformed or replaced. These activities can take place in classrooms, as part of professional development activities, or form the basis of research studies and advocacy efforts. Evidence of the usefulness of this approach obtained through discussions with undergraduate health studies students is presented.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":"166-181"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145034515","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":"The future of reproduction in Eve Smith's <i>Off Target</i> and Kira Peikoff's <i>Baby X</i>.","authors":"Aline Ferreira","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013321","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013321","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay analyses two novels that explore reproductive scenarios which may be implemented in the near future: human germline genome editing and in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), dramatised in Eve Smith's <i>Off-Target</i> (2022) and Kira Peikoff's <i>Baby X</i> (2024), respectively.Smith's <i>Off Target</i> considers the plethora of medical, ethical, social and familial implications of germline editing, which is used to modify an embryo's genome and enhance it with traits deemed optimal that will be passed on to future generations, in this way effectively creating designer babies and radically interfering with the laws of evolution and genetic inheritance. The novel deals with the potential unintended consequences of genetic engineering, in particular CRISPR/Cas9. Genetic edits, if insufficiently tested, can have off-target effects, alluded to in the name of the novel. Peikoff's <i>Baby X</i> takes the premise of <i>Off Target</i> a step further by introducing IVG, exploring the multiple ramifications of this as yet undeveloped reproductive technology which would radically change the reproductive landscape as we know it.Meanwhile, the science that will enable germline editing and IVG is advancing rapidly, making it imperative to consider the far-reaching repercussions of these technologies, not only in medical terms but specifically with regard to ethical implications for families and society in general. These novels are powerful reminders that the debate about the future applications of genome editing and IVG needs to happen now. The issues raised by the novels will be analysed mainly through a gender studies and bioethics lens.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":"190-198"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145081892","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":"Interdiscursivity and its historical shifts in China's public health risk communication letters: from SARS to the post-COVID-19 era.","authors":"Xinyue Dai, Sizheng Li","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013656","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013656","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Interdiscursivity refers to the blending of multiple discourses, genres, or styles within a single communicative event. This study investigates the interdiscursivity of Chinese public health risk communication letters issued during major health crises over the past two decades, including SARS, H1N1, COVID-19 and seasonal influenza. It examines how multiple discourse types-advice-giving, scientific, literary, authoritative, affective and informal-are interwoven and strategically adapted across different crises to guide public behaviour, mobilise communities and foster trust. Using qualitative document analysis combined with thematic analysis, the study traces the historical evolution of these interdiscursive patterns and situates them within China's broader public health documentary heritage. The findings demonstrate that these letters not only translate abstract risks into actionable guidance but also serve as instruments for documenting sociocultural shifts and governance practices, and for supporting collective memory and institutionalised learning. By linking the diachronic evolution of interdiscursive strategies to the social and documentary functions of public health communication, this study highlights the dual role of risk communication letters as both practical tools and enduring public health documents, offering insights for future communication strategies in health crises.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":"264-275"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145716190","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":"Aesthetic experience in medical education: <i>Wit</i> as a case of experiential knowledge.","authors":"Barbora Řebíková","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-013926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-013926","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article develops a demanding, though non-exclusivist, version of aesthetic cognitivism and argues for its significance in contemporary medical education. Although the arts are increasingly used to foster empathy, reflection and professional identity formation, their educational value is often justified in instrumental terms, as an enrichment that supports competencies otherwise secured by biomedical training. Against this framing, I argue that aesthetic experience offers a distinctive mode of understanding that can make embodied, affective and existential dimensions of illness and dying experientially salient in ways that are difficult to cultivate reliably within the constraints of formal medical education.Drawing on philosophical aesthetics from Plato and Aristotle to Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and Berys Gaut, and situating the argument within medical humanities and narrative medicine, the article clarifies how aesthetic form can shape perception, attention and moral imagination without claiming epistemic exclusivity. As a case study, it examines Mike Nichols's film <i>Wit</i>, showing how cinematic form enables learners to grasp aspects of vulnerability, dependency and end-of-life experience that resist straightforward translation into clinical description or ethical abstraction. Based on long-term pedagogical use of the film with medical students, the article concludes that arts-based engagement is best understood not as a supplementary add-on but as a distinctive contribution to professional formation that complements scientific knowledge and ethical reasoning.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147976425","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":"Promoting mutual aid and interdependence for queer ethnic minorities during COVID-19.","authors":"Chase Ledin","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013511","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores the representation of sexual health in black and brown communities in London during the early COVID-19 pandemic. I examine the 'Sex & the Coronavirus' (2020) health comic series and interviews with HIV activists to demonstrate how they shifted the focus of COVID-19 health promotion away from the hegemonic white middle class and towards black and brown experiences. I use textual and visual analysis to trace the construction of practical information about COVID-19 and STI prevention-including biomedical, public health and relationship advice-and demonstrate how the imagery and language of mutual aid and interdependence enact counterhegemonic strategies. I argue that these materials and activist experiences set out key principles for counterhegemonic health promotion practice at the intersection of sexual health and COVID-19 prevention. I suggest that these principles should be further trialled for inclusive health promotion theory and practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147965110","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":"Epidemic imaginaries in literature and film: a comparative study of narrative responses to plague and pandemic.","authors":"Bhumika Rohitkumar Bhatt, Pawan Dwivedi","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013615","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Epidemics have historically been both biomedical disasters and cultural stories that societies interpret and recount. This study explores the epidemic imaginary, examining how literature and cinema symbolically depict contagion by analysing narratives of contagion produced during the Plague era in literature and modern pandemic representations in film. The research considers some plague-era literature, such as Albert Camus' <i>The Plague</i> (1947) and Thomas Mann's <i>Death in Venice</i> (1912), alongside more recent pandemic literature like Dean Koontz's <i>The Eyes of Darkness</i> (1981), as well as two films: <i>Contagion</i> (2011), directed by Steven Soderbergh, and <i>Outbreak</i> (1995), directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Drawing from interdisciplinary fields including literary studies, film theory and medical humanities, the study highlights moments of systemic and existential responses to contagion. It explores recurring themes such as fear, denial, governance, death, mortality and resilience, demonstrating how epidemics serve as meaningful moments for both existential reflection and systemic analysis. I argue that epidemic stories function as cultural scripts, that literature subtly allegorises contagion through introspection, and that cinema vividly dramatises urgency by depicting collapsing systems. Overall, these works highlight how societies narrate and remember solidarity during crises, rearticulating collective resilience in the face of devastation.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147857433","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":"Mapping the body: poetic metaphor and AI imaging in Carol Ann Duffy's 'The Map-Woman'.","authors":"Ozlem Aydin Ozturk","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013748","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013748","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'The Map-Woman', examining the metaphor of the female body as a map in relation to artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted medical imaging technologies. The study explores how Duffy's poetic rendering of the body as a cartographic surface fixed with streets, landmarks and memories resonates with contemporary practices of bodily visualisation in diagnostic medicine. Drawing on feminist theory, spatial poetics and digital epistemologies, this article argues that both poetry and AI imaging engage in acts of mapping the body, although through different epistemic frameworks: one rooted in narrative, memory and affect; the other in data, abstraction and algorithmic logic. While Duffy's poem foregrounds the emotional and historical dimensions of embodiment, AI-driven imaging systems often reduce the body to quantifiable data, potentially overlooking the sociocultural and subjective aspects of human experience. This contrast highlights the limitations of technological representations and underscores the value of literary metaphor in preserving the complexity of embodied identity. By placing poetic and technological mappings in dialogue, this article advocates for a more holistic understanding of the body, one that integrates narrative, emotion and cultural context alongside technological precision. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how literature can serve as a critical lens through which to interrogate the promises and limitations of AI in reconfiguring our relationship to the body in the digital age.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147844326","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}
Janet Weston, Amanda M Caleb, Allan Arturo González Estrada, Thomas Hehlmann, Stephanie A Larson, Lise Saffran, Rebecca Garden
{"title":"Teaching public health humanities: innovations from the field.","authors":"Janet Weston, Amanda M Caleb, Allan Arturo González Estrada, Thomas Hehlmann, Stephanie A Larson, Lise Saffran, Rebecca Garden","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013744","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013744","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article offers a comprehensive definition and illustration of the field of public health humanities. Ranging across the disciplines and educational settings of seven different scholar-educators, it offers a clear and detailed discussion of this often-overlooked branch of the wider health humanities, with a focus on teaching. Public health humanities brings the theories, methods and resources of arts and humanities disciplines into conversation with the core activities and frameworks associated with public health. This means that approaches from fields including literature studies, creative writing, history and philosophy engage with concepts including the social and structural determinants of health, health equity, health promotion, epidemiology and risk, surveillance and screening, disaster management and social medicine. Public health humanities focuses humanistic inquiry on the systems and structures that impact health, the values and challenges of population-based approaches, and the interconnectedness of illness and health with environments, ecologies, and large-scale social, economic and political factors. We introduce the shared themes that unite our case studies and then go on to describe seven different approaches to teaching public health humanities, across a variety of contexts from undergraduate arts programmes to specialist training in public health. We offer seven individual accounts with concrete examples to illustrate the models and methods taught, in the hope that these will assist and inspire others. Useful frameworks of wide applicability include a socioecological model of health inequity and an 'iceberg model': a metaphor for analysing what lies below the surface for specific learners.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147487852","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":"Vaccine decision-making among Serbian parents in the Netherlands: vaccine hesitancy in the 'Post-Trust' world.","authors":"Marija Brujić","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013366","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013366","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Vaccine hesitancy is a major contemporary threat to global health leading to the delay or refusal of vaccines. Quantitative studies on vaccination attitudes generally state that vaccine hesitancy is higher among immigrants. However, qualitative studies show a spectrum of vaccine-related attitudes and behaviours among immigrant parents, from refusal over delay to acceptance of all childhood vaccines. This paper is based on a 2020 qualitative study among Serbian parents living in the Netherlands. It discusses childhood vaccine compliance, focusing on parents with at least one fully vaccinated child. In general, the Serbian parents interviewed made decisions relating to vaccination based on their sociocultural background (ie, viewing vaccines as a part of 'traditional' upbringing), intersubjective norms (ie, they trust the state, vaccines, health officials, peers) or they lack sufficient language proficiency or information regarding vaccines. More importantly, the results also show that some participants exhibit vaccine hesitancy because they do not trust the vaccines, the government, health officials or pharmaceutical companies. The intriguing results confirm that vaccine hesitancy does occur among both the highly educated and lower educated, informed and uninformed, as well as users of complementary medicine and the religious (here, Serbian Orthodox Christian) and non-religious. Thus, this study interprets contemporary vaccine hesitancy as a rational response among vaccine-accepting parents to live in a post-trust world burdened by regulatory scandals, scientific pluralism and the availability of alternative information. Consequently, the study indicates that contemporary vaccine hesitancy requires understanding as a contemporary 'risk management strategy' outside of contextual, individual/group and vaccine-related factors.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145795179","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}