Medical Humanities最新文献

{"title":"Double life of the pill: towards a cabaret methodology for contraceptive research.","authors":"Katie Paterson","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013101","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013101","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, I propose cabaret methodology as a valuable paradigm for capturing experiences of hormonal contraception in all their complexity. I sought a playful, self-aware and ethically rigorous practice to explore and express the lived experiences of people who use hormonal contraception, including myself. I have spent the past 4 years developing the solo cabaret piece Side FX, which functions as a repository of contraceptive experiences and histories, and queers the clinical encounter through comedic audience participation.The pill is variously configured as an agent of liberation or oppression, a liberal feminist victory or a white feminist weapon. Curiously for such a contentious technology, it is rarely visible in theatre, film or television. Taking the pill is an action so mundane that it rarely ever merits dramatic representation. It is the antithesis of drama done to prevent a sudden and drastic change (pregnancy, motherhood, abortion), yet drastic changes are often felt by the pill-taker, dramatically complicated by their ambiguity. Working within a tradition of feminist health activism, I argue for the importance of maintaining multiplicity while analysing discourse around the pill.Cabaret presents itself as a forum through which to explore, express and trouble the experiences under consideration; a series of turns, connected thematically, hosted by a mercurial, dominant presence, revelling in rug-pulling, sophisticated comedy and contradictions. The application of cabaret to research can allow multiplicity and ambiguity to stand without rejecting the paradigms of research altogether. I argue that these multiple narratives offer a productive ambiguity that reflects how varied individual experiences of hormonal contraception are.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":"408-414"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143789093","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":"Role of science fiction in conceptualising the reproductive future: a linguistic and literary perspective.","authors":"Alexandra Krendel, Mike Ryder","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013207","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013207","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this paper, we explore how members of the public invoke science fiction tropes and references in response to the topic of complete ectogenesis (where the entire development of a fetus takes place outside of the human body in an artificial womb environment) and, to a lesser extent, genome editing. This paper addresses a critical research gap as fiction is central to how the public make sense of new technologies. This research is timely, as human clinical trials of artificial placenta and womb technology are expected to start within the next few years. We argue that gauging public opinion on this technology is a critical early step in understanding how the public might respond to such new technologies, should they become available in the near future and be presented in a particular fashion.Using corpus linguistic techniques, we analysed a large dataset of 15 548 YouTube comments (382 057 words) made in response to a video that depicts a fictional artificial womb facility, which went viral in December 2022 when some viewers believed it to be real. We identified several statistically significant trends, as commenters associated the video with science fiction, horror and dystopian fiction, while also making specific reference to <i>Aldous Huxley</i>, <i>Brave New World</i> and <i>Star Wars</i> (Clone Wars). These observations reveal how popular science fiction narratives serve as a key point of reference and that they stand as a powerful warning in the public imagination, and as a potential barrier to public acceptance of new reproductive technologies-despite the potential benefits for social justice and reproductive rights. Our findings therefore have implications for how scientific developments are communicated to the general public.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":"306-315"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12421118/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143732278","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":"Performing dissections: feminist performance as research methodology in the medical humanities.","authors":"Alex Mermikides","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013049","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013049","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Over the past two years, I have been making a performance about human dissection, capitalising on my position as a performance researcher embedded in the medical school at King's College London. The performance seeks to capture and convey the affective culture of the dissection room and the uncanny materiality of the preserved and anatomised bodies within it, dwelling on the emotional, ethical and existential anxiety, the awe, wonder and morbid fascination they elicit. In this article, I demonstrate how the practice of feminist performance might be employed as a research methodology within medical education, and how it might challenge binary assumptions about how future doctors construct their professional identity, by deconstructing the bodies of deceased donors.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":"367-375"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143693951","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":"Ending nuclear weapons, before they end us.","authors":"Chris Zielinski","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013368","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013368","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":"304-305"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12421090/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144081312","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":"On the consequences of childbirth: obstetrics/gynaecology, comparative anatomy and racial theories in 19th century France and Brazil.","authors":"Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013097","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013097","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The following paper is centred on an analysis of comparative studies of the human pelvis developed over the 19th century by mostly French natural scientists, physical anthropologists, students of the human anatomy and doctors engaged in the initial stages of the emerging fields of gynaecology and obstetrics. As this paper will argue, there was considerable overlap between these specialisations, producing a fundamentally masculine, Eurocentric and racialised knowledge that had an enormous impact in establishing racially informed gynaecological and obstetric practices. This paper argues that comparative pelvic anatomy studies originated from the belief that African and Black women had specifically different pelves and genitalia and served to stratify women of different races and promoted racially oriented obstetric and gynaecological treatments. Despite their European origins, these French publications had profound repercussions across various regions of the Atlantic world and directly influenced the medical care provided to women of African descent in both slave and postemancipation societies, particularly in Brazil. In 1887, a doctoral candidate from the Rio de Janeiro Medical School (Brazil) wrote a dissertation in which he advocated and justified the racialised treatments offered to enslaved, free and soon-to-be-free women of African descendent who delivered their offspring at the medical school's maternity ward. In his advocacy for such practices, the author drew connections between the prevailing methods at Rio de Janeiro's Medical School to a long lineage of French medical thought on the racialised comparative anatomy of women's pelvises throughout the 19th century.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":"316-328"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143041545","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":"Prozac as medicine, metaphor and identity: reimagining recovery as a rhetorical process in Lauren Slater's <i>Prozac Diary</i>.","authors":"Swikriti Sanyal, Hemachandran Karah","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2024-012973","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2024-012973","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines Lauren Slater's memoir, <i>Prozac Diary</i>, to understand the role of language in reimagining the notion of recovery. Written from the standpoint of a consumer of antidepressant drugs, <i>Prozac Diary</i> underlines the pervasiveness of professional psychiatry's pathologising practices and its psychopharmacological interventions in the 90s in the USA. Moreover, it unpacks the nuances of the relationship between the person and the pill at the intersections of myriad medical and socio-cultural discourses. Reading the memoir from the perspectives of disability studies scholars such as Kimberly E. Emmons and Lennard J. Davis, we argue that Slater's use of figurative language to critically engage with the Prozac discourse is a rhetorical act of self-care. Furthermore, we contend that by normalising illness and challenging the ableist assumptions of normalcy, Slater also invests in rhetorical care of the collective self/bodymind.This paper demonstrates how through a metaphorical representation of Prozac, Slater questions the predominant mental health discourses that construct the meanings of 'illness' and 'health' and shape illness and health-based identities. Simultaneously, through her dialogical negotiations with the Prozac discourse to reconstitute a complex health identity, she raises fundamental questions about the existence of a 'core', 'authentic', 'healthy', pre-Prozac selfhood that the drug claims to restore. Therefore, by unravelling the intrapersonal, socio-cultural and discursive ramifications of recovery, as opposed to psychiatry's perfunctory understanding of biological cure as a restoration of a socially desirable state of 'normalcy', she is able to reclaim the lived experience of recovery. We argue that in <i>Prozac Diary</i>, recovery does not merely imply a passive internalisation of psychiatry's biological determinism and its psychopharmaceutical approaches. Instead, it is a rhetorical process that enables the medicalised individuals to actively engage with the mental health system and interrogate the possibility of critically responding to its normative frameworks as agentic subjects.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":"329-338"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143392299","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":"Whose values are driving the design of robot swarms for humanitarian aid?","authors":"Razanne Abu-Aisheh","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013426","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Robot swarms hold significant promise for humanitarian aid, offering scalable, autonomous solutions for search and rescue, aid delivery, and disaster response. Their ability to self-organise, adapt, and operate in hazardous or inaccessible environments makes them particularly well-suited to crisis scenarios. However, their effectiveness and safety depend not only on technical performance but also on how well they are designed with affected communities in mind. In conflict and post-disaster settings- - often in the Global South- - these systems risk being misinterpreted or rejected if deployed without culturally sensitive, participatory design, especially given that most swarm technologies are developed in the Global North. This article advocates for a shift toward participatory swarm design, an approach that integrates local knowledge, values, and perceptions into system development. It highlights the critical role of human-swarm interaction (HSI) in fostering trust, preventing miscommunication, and enabling safe deployment. By involving communities from the outset, designers can create swarm systems that are not only technically capable but also culturally appropriate, widely accepted, and truly effective in the contexts they aim to serve.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144856739","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":"Sharing in the community of having lost a child.","authors":"Malene Beck, Michael van Manen","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013312","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013312","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>What does it mean to share an experience of losing a child? Not solely to put such an experience into words, but also to speak of it to others who may share their own experiences of loss? What is shared in such moments of sharing? Here, we present a phenomenological study of sharing among parents who have lost a child. We draw on observations and anecdotes from a parental bereavement group. Our thoughts are organised around thematic statements that reflect the value of these sharing spaces for bereaved parents: sharing as an experience of sharing something, sharing as an experience of a communal connection, sharing as an experience of empathic reflection and sharing as an experience of shared responsibility. By articulating these aspects, we hope not to prove the value of sharing but instead to show the meaningfulness of it; thereby, contributing to the very sparse body of evidence on home-based care and support for bereaved families. Exploring the phenomenology of sharing the loss of a child discloses empathic communal shared spaces among bereaving parents that may be inherent to palliative care practices.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144250235","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":"\"Whatever you asked for you got\": the impact of charitable funding of paediatric oncology in the UK - from 1960 to 2000.","authors":"Lucy Walsh","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2024-013221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2024-013221","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The considerable charitable funding of paediatric oncology propelled the medical specialty in the late 1970s and early 1980s, offering support across research, clinical services and psychosocial provision. In postwar Britain, emotive appeals to the public were met with generous donations, which allowed cancer charities to fund research despite a lack of central funding. Besides funding, however, charities have been able to respond in an agile way to the needs of children with cancer and their families, meeting this need where National Health Service funding could not. They also provided useful pump priming for important services that central funding subsequently took over. Reliance on charitable funding in paediatric oncology, however, could leave services and research organisations disrupted and unable to make long-term strategic plans. Charities were able to provide psychosocial care that has responded to the changing meaning of a cancer diagnosis in childhood. Although not essential or life-saving, this provision attempted to alleviate some of the practical, financial and, as far as possible, emotional difficulties experienced by children with cancer and their families. Despite the enormous positive change propelled by charitable giving in the specialty, this funding model can see some health inequalities exacerbated, both between regions and patient groups with other illnesses or disabilities.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144817870","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":"Sustaining policy promise: rhetorics of disease elimination and sustainable development.","authors":"Tim Rhodes","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013245","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The focus of this paper is the discourse of the 'endgame' of disease elimination linked to the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The aim is to explore how policy promise is sustained in the face of faltering progress, such as when targets are missed or appear unreachable. Viewed via Lauren Berlant's work on the 'cruel optimism' of unmet promise, with Ben Anderson's work on affective attachments, the analysis looks first at the 2030 SDGs and then at disease elimination through the examples of hepatitis C and HIV. The materials for analysis include political declarations, global progress reports and strategy documents. These materials sustain imaginaries of a universal endgame promise <i>as if</i> there cannot be an otherwise. We see how 'crisis' is enacted to account for failure as well as to sustain promise. We also see that the threat of failure gives rise to recalibrated promise in what might be described as an emerging 'elimination otherwise'. Here, the figure of crisis affords increasing attention to disease elimination as a 'problem of the social'. Discourses of the disease elimination endgame act as sites of potential, even in crisis.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761763","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}