Medical Humanities最新文献

{"title":"Illness and (hyper)masculinity in ‘HIMM’ comics from the USA","authors":"Paul Mitchell","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2023-012767","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2023-012767","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I analyse HIMM comics from the USA, a specific textualisation of graphic medicine/pathography that deals with a variety of illness experiences by male cartoonists. It is my contention that, in the existing literature, the motif of masculinity in autobiographical health-related comics is an underdeveloped area of academic enquiry. As a result, my analysis focuses on how three North American men depict ill health in their work in relation to existing sociological understandings of male behaviour. The texts I discuss are John Porcellino’s The Hospital Suite (2014), a story about his abdominal tumour; Matt Freedman’s exploration of adenoid cystic carcinoma in Relatively Indolent but Relentless (2014); and Peter Dunlap-Shohl’s My Degeneration (2015), which discusses the cartoonist’s experience of Parkinson’s disease. At the same time, I use the concept of hypermasculinity to explore the similar visual and verbal strategies through which these men respond to their physical and emotional suffering. It is my intention to illustrate how HIMM comics provide an important, non-medicalised lens through which clinical practitioners and lay readers alike can better see the subjectivised experience of male illness in the early 21st century. With a focus on the concept of bracketing, the representation of pain and vulnerability, men’s loss of self-identity and hardiness, I explore how HIMM comics act as important counter-narratives to biomedical discourse by visualising the phenomenological aspects of men’s ill health. In this way, the texts in my analytical corpus offer a valuable gender-oriented understanding of the connection between illnesses and (hyper)masculinity. No data are available.","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139052737","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":"Conceptual anatomy of the female genitalia using text mining and implications for patient care","authors":"Carmen Thong, Alexis Doyle","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2023-012747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2023-012747","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the conceptual histories of words associated with female genital parts to explore how they may affect the lived experience of people with these parts and the quality of gynaecological care they receive. Specifically, we examine the implications of using the word ‘vagina’ to replace the word ‘vulva’, or indeed to indicate the entire female genitalia. This article does so through an analysis of existing scholarly work and through text mining methods such as word frequencies, most distinctive word collocates and word-embeddings drawn from literary and women’s magazine corpora. We find that words indicating specific female genital parts are very infrequently mentioned in our corpora, which shows that there is a troubling lack of exposure and education in our socio-cultural context when it comes to the female genital anatomy. When they are mentioned, their usage reflects historical and patriarchal associations that have been primarily attached to the word ‘vagina’. When it comes to the ‘vagina’ and ‘vulva’, the penis is the most prevalent association by far; whereas the most commonly occurring female genital parts are parts to do with reproduction—reinforcing a long-standing and disproportionate emphasis on the female genitalia’s reproductive function. Our research also reveals a concerning emphasis on non-evidence-based female hygiene products, thus perpetuating the damaging stereotype of the dirty vagina. These findings may explain many negative patient outcomes such as stigma attached to seeking out timely gynaecological care, lack of informed medical consent and non-evidence-based practices exacerbated by problematic cultural depictions of the female genitalia. They can also explain the neglect of female sexual agency, pleasure and well-being. Understanding historical and contemporary usages of words for the female genitalia has important implications for the quality of patient care today and is a critical component of gender and reproductive justice. Data are available on reasonable request. Data may be obtained from a third party and are not publicly available. Corpora used for text mining are not publicly available and under copyright. Additional word frequency, MDW collocation or word embedding results may be requested from Carmen Thong.","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139052078","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":"Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis: interdisciplinary creative art practice and nature connections","authors":"Catherine Baker, Nina Morris, Athanasios Tsirikos, Olga Fotakopoulou, Flora Parrott","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2023-012796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2023-012796","url":null,"abstract":"Scoliosis is an abnormal lateral curvature of the spine with the large majority of cases classed as idiopathic, meaning there is no known cause. Typically, most cases occur in children and young people affecting approximately three per cent of the adult populace with five out of six cases being female. TheBackBone: Interdisciplinary Creative Practices and Body Positive Resiliencepilot research study used arts and humanities methods to measure the impact of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) on well-being and body perception. The research aimed to contribute to a better understanding of alternative treatments towards improving quality of life in young women diagnosed with AIS. In particular, concentrating on two highlighted priorities from the Scoliosis Priority Setting Partnership: (1) How is quality of life affected by scoliosis and its treatment? How can we measure this in ways that are meaningful to patients? (2) How are the psychological impacts (including on body image) of diagnosis and treatment best managed.Using established medical techniques, art-based workshops, and focus groups with postoperative participants with AIS and their families we gathered both quantitative and qualitative data. The workshops explored the aesthetics of imperfection through material investigations that focus on the body as both an object and how it is experienced using the metaphor of tree images. Drawing parallels between the growth patterns of trees that, for complex and often unknown reasons, have grown unexpectedly we explored questions around ideological notions of perfect growth through art-making in a non-clinical setting. Uniquely, the pilot project sought to draw on insights from four key disciplines (art, medicine, psychology and human geography), thinking across boundaries to evoke different ways of knowing and understanding the complexities of body perception through image-making.","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138953429","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":"Transparent boundaries as scenographies of trust: the COVID-19 pandemic from the view of material cultural studies and artistic works.","authors":"Monika Ankele, Céline Kaiser","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012603","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012603","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>From the start, the profound transformations that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic found expression in a plethora of objects and facilities that dominated our daily lives far beyond the clinical sphere. Supermarkets, hotel receptions, taxis, restaurants, doctors' surgeries and even schools were equipped with plexiglass screens of all sizes and shapes to continue to allow face-to-face encounters. In our paper, we trace these changes and their social impact in our everyday world. Starting from the material cultures of our daily spaces that changed in the context of COVID-19 and the new patterns of movement that had to be practised, we ask how our sensory modes of perception and social spaces changed temporarily. With the methodological approaches offered to us by material cultural studies and artistic practices, we pursue these questions on the one hand with historical examples of the clinical design of space and on the other with a view to artistic interventions that deal with the pandemic present and reflect the transparent boundary markings in their meaning for sensual and social inter-relations.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41137472","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":"Antibiotics online: digital pharmacy marketplaces and pastiche medicine.","authors":"Ben Lyall, Anthony K J Smith, Katie Attwell, Mark D M David McGregor Davis","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012574","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012574","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The internet enables access to information and the purchasing of medical products of various quality and legality. Research and regulatory attention have focused on the trafficking of illicit substances, potential physical harms of pharmaceuticals, and possibilities like financial fraud. However, there is far less attention paid to antibiotics and other antimicrobials used to treat infections. With online pharmacies affording greater access, caution around antibiotic use is needed due to the increasing health risks of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The COVID-19 pandemic has helped to normalise digital healthcare and contactless prescribing, amplifying the need for caution. Little is known of how antibiotics are consumed via digital pharmacy and implications for AMR prevention. To expand insight for AMR prevention policy in Australia and internationally, we use digital ethnographic methods to explore how digital pharmacies function in the context of health advice and policy related to AMR, commonly described as antimicrobial stewardship. We find that digital pharmacy marketplaces constitute 'pastiche medicine'. They curate access to pharmaceutical and information products that emulate biomedical authority combined with emphasis on the 'self-assembly' of healthcare. Pastiche medicine empowers the consumer but borrows biomedical expertise about antibiotics, untethering these goods from critical medicine information, and from AMR prevention strategies. We reflect on the implications of pastiche medicine for AMR policy, what the antibiotics case contributes to wider critical scholarship on digital pharmacy, and how medical humanities research might consider researching online consumption in future.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10288957","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":"Written on milk: exploring messages written on donated human-milk bags.","authors":"Ayelet Oreg","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012608","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012608","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Every so often, among the bags of breast milk sent for donation to milk banks, clear bags of milk are found that are hand decorated and accompanied by short texts written by donating mothers. In the bank labs, the milk is poured into pasteurisation containers, and the bags are thrown away. The milk comes to the neonatal ward packed in bar-coded bottles. Both donor and the recipient are anonymous to one another. To whom are the donating mothers writing their messages? What can be learnt from their writings and drawings about their lived experiences of transitioning into motherhood? In the current study I integrate theoretical content about the transition to motherhood and theories about epistolary literature, likening the milk bags to postcards and letters. In contrast to a private letter written with ink on folded paper in a closed envelope, writing on 'milk postcards' is exposed and privacy is absent. 'Milk postcards' have a double transparency: the self is reflected in the messages and the contents of the bag-breast milk, a bodily fluid from the body of the donor. From a visual analysis of 81 photos of human-milk bags with text and drawings photographed by milk banks laboratory technicians, it appears that the milk postcards serve as a 'third voice' that echoes the difficulties and the joys in the transition to motherhood, and that donors experience an imagined solidarity with unknown mothers. The milk itself serves sometimes as an image and sometimes as the background for the writing, while its colour, texture and the form in which it is frozen constitute part of the text and serve as self-testimony for the mother of her capability and of her being a nurturing mother, for both her own baby and other unknown babies.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9763920","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":"Forensic rhetoric: COVID-19, the forum and the boundaries of healthcare evidence.","authors":"David Houston Jones","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2023-012609","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2023-012609","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the shifting role of healthcare evidence in public health presentations. This article investigates the rhetoric of those presentations as a phenomenon indicating both the commitment to evidence-based public health messaging and its political loading in three interlinked case studies: computer-generated imagery ; 'podium' presentation and the NSO Fleming leak of COVID-19 contact tracing data. The pandemic has seen healthcare evidence attain ever-greater visibility in public forums, and those forums have themselves undergone rapid transformation. 'Podium' presentations such as press conferences have featured colourful imagery, and the manifold visualisations of SARS-CoV-2 which have accompanied television broadcasts and web pages display an insistent internal rhetoric. I analyse both forms of rhetoric for what they say about the 'forensic' moment created by COVID-19, and evaluate each in relation to Weizman's conception of the forum, which enables both 'frontstage' corporate and governmental image-building and public scrutiny. This paper evaluates the politics of the presentational strategies which have arisen around COVID-19 and the ethical potential of the forum.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10020767","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":"Postdigital health practices: new directions in medical humanities.","authors":"Monika Pietrzak-Franger","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2023-012611","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2023-012611","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Digitalisation has changed the way we understand and practice health. The recent pandemic has accelerated some of the developments in digital health and brought about modifications in public access to information. Taking this into consideration, this programmatic paper sets the stage for and conceptualises postdigital health practices as a possible field of inquiry within medical humanities. While delineating some central aspects of said practices, I draw attention to their significance in contemporary strategies of knowledge production. Spotlighting online environments as the point of ingress for the analysis of these practices, I propose three possible foci of critical and methodological engagement. By spotlighting the serialisation, multimodality, and transmediality of such environments, I argue, we have a chance to both augment and go beyond the field's long-standing preoccupation with narrative, attend to various strategies of communicating illness experience, and re-frame them within larger questions of systemic inequalities. On this basis, and taking as examples COVID-19 and Long COVID, I sketch some of the directions that future strands of medical humanities may take and some of the questions we still have to ask for the field to overcome its own biases and blind spots.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138177561","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":"Hanna Rion and <i>The Weekly Dispatch</i>'s twilight sleep crusade.","authors":"Eleanor Taylor","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012595","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012595","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The story of twilight sleep is an important, yet neglected, episode in the history of obstetric pain relief in Britain. One reason for its neglect in historical writing is that most of the discussion of the therapy took place in newspapers, particularly the <i>Weekly Dispatch</i> Using digitised newspapers, as well as medical journals, this article reconstructs the largely overlooked story of twilight sleep in Britain. Twilight sleep was comprised of two drugs, scopolamine and morphine, which acted together to remove the pain of labour, as well as memory of it. Twilight sleep gained popularity in 1915 in Britain, a year after it became popular in America, on which most scholarship has focused. One of the main advocates for the use of twilight sleep in Britain was Hanna Rion, who wrote a series of weekly articles in 1916 campaigning for its use. Rion's articles, and the response to them, show how the rise in popularity of twilight sleep reflected concerns about a declining birth rate amidst the backdrop of World War I. Through studying twilight sleep we see how women began to see themselves as consumers and shape medical practice, before the natural childbirth movement, which it has traditionally been attributed to. Therefore, twilight sleep provides us with the missing link in the story of obstetric anaesthetics, between the discovery of chloroform in 1847 and the natural childbirth movement in the 1930s.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10804001/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9546322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prostheses of disability: Islamic fundamentalism and the disabled body in postcolonial Arab fiction.","authors":"Abir Hamdar","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012516","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2022-012516","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay focuses on the representational relationship between disability and Islamic fundamentalism in select contemporary postcolonial literary texts by Arab authors. The essay draws mainly on critical disability theory on the concept of prosthesis to argue that disability functions as a narrative and emotional prosthesis to narratives on Islamic fundamentalism at the same time as it lays bare this very process of instrumentalisation. To this end the essay asks: What are the privileged affects that attach themselves to representations of disability in fictions of Islamic fundamentalism? How do textual and affective prostheses emerge out of, or feed back into, Islamist contexts, worldviews and subjectivities? Finally, in what ways do the narratives under analysis uphold, lay bare or dismantle such prosthetic functions of the disabled body? In particular, this essay focuses on three specific prostheses of disability in the texts: conversion narratives, contemporary histories of Islamic fundamentalist violence and the figure of the disabled Islamist.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9373652","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}