Medical Humanities最新文献

{"title":"How animal diseases become endemic: case studies of avian influenza in France and African swine fever in Italy.","authors":"Frederic Keck","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013520","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article compares the management of highly pathogenic avian influenza in France and African swine fever in Italy, asking how experts have qualified these epizootics as endemics. While farmers perceive wild animals as threatening their domestic animals, hunters and wildlife managers understand the behaviour of wild animals as a potentiality for regulation. This distinction between wild and domestic is ignored by small-scale farmers who are often hunters, but it is reinforced by trade unions supporting industrial farming and by health authorities at provincial, national and European Union levels. Animal activists, on the other side, trouble this distinction because they take the perspective of animals as sentient beings, endowing them with rights or souls by their feeling of compassion. Epizootics thus produce a wide range of perspectives across and beyond wild/domesticated dichotomies as viruses reveal different aspects of relations between humans and animals.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148799414","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 alone, writing together: freeing the 'I' in reflective writing.","authors":"Roshni Beeharry","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013638","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013638","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148799373","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":"Transforming biomedical uncertainty: the sociohistorical origins of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).","authors":"Sally Cross","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013657","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013657","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) are serious and disabling long-term conditions characterised by uncertainty surrounding their aetiology, diagnosis and treatment. People with ME/CFS struggle to be understood, taken seriously and supported with their illness. At least since the 1990s, ME and CFS have been considered by many to be related, overlapping or synonymous with one another. However, the concepts originated from different sociohistorical contexts. This article disentangles the histories of ME and CFS, roots them in the UK and the USA respectively, and compares how they emerged as medical and scientific objects. Drawing on a critical literature analysis of medical texts between 1950 and 1990, I explore how both ME and CFS materialised through the regulation of uncertainty within biomedical systems. In both cases, uncertainty was transformed into knowledge by systematically obscuring certain aspects of illness. These transformations shaped what could be known about these conditions in the decades to come and may be at the root of the epistemic injustices experienced by patients. Those who campaign for more scientific research into ME/CFS should be wary of the propensity for biomedicine to generate ignorance in the face of these complex conditions. This analysis contributes to a growing body of research on the medical sociology of ignorance, further illustrating the value of uncertainty and ignorance as heuristic tools for understanding the politics of knowledge production within biomedical systems.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7619391/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148765552","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":"Critical interloping, collaboration and entangling the 'expert cultures' of art, science and lived experience: Jacqueline Donachie's artist-led research on myotonic dystrophy.","authors":"Fiona Johnstone","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-013979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-013979","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The article positions artist-led research as a vital methodology for an engaged, transformative and translational medical humanities. Recent scholarship aligned with the critical visual medical humanities has drawn attention to art practices as epistemologically generative, suggesting that the methods of criticality mobilised by artists offer a distinctive and valuable approach to addressing questions of health. In line with this approach, this article proposes artist Jacqueline Donachie's sustained collaborative enquiry into the science and lived experience of myotonic dystrophy as a compelling example of how artist-led research can reshape the way scientists and clinicians engage with and understand a particular condition. Donachie's practice demonstrates how artistic methods-dialogue, observation, ethnographic engagement and aesthetic distillation-can productively entangle scientific and experiential knowledge, foregrounding the perspectives of families and patients whose insights have historically been marginal to genetic research and clinical care. By bringing different expert cultures together in mutually generative conversation, Donachie's practice raises important questions about how different forms of knowledge are mobilised, and how they might inform and enrich one another. The article contributes to ongoing efforts to conceptualise collaborative knowledge-producing practices across the (visual) medical humanities by advancing the figure of the critical interloper, a practitioner who works between epistemic spaces, drawing together diverse knowledge systems in ways that challenge, unsettle and ultimately bring about change.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148762122","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":"Seeing pain, trauma and anxiety: the visual politics of credibility in the Really Strange series.","authors":"Ajeesh A K","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-014022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-014022","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Steve Haines' and Sophie Standing's Really Strange comics (<i>Pain is Really Strange</i> (2015), <i>Trauma is Really Strange</i> (2015) and <i>Anxiety is Really Strange</i> (2018)) blend graphical narrative with medical science to tackle phenomena often deemed 'invisible' or medically perplexing. Using a visual medical humanities lens, the article situates the Really Strange series in the context of graphical medicine and explores how visual and narrative strategies can both democratise medical knowledge and inadvertently reinforce certain 'regimes of proof'. A core focus is the credibility problem surrounding chronic pain, psychological trauma and anxiety, subjective experiences frequently met with doubt because they evade direct visual proof. The comics confront this problem through a visual politics of credibility, borrowing imagery and conventions from scientific discourse to substantiate knowledge and validate personal experience. It is written for medical humanities and graphical medicine scholars, clinical educators and practitioners interested in communication, psychoeducation and the ethical problem of credibility in relation to pain, trauma and anxiety. Its purpose is to show how comics can help readers understand, discuss and teach invisible forms of suffering that are often difficult to verify through conventional biomedical means. The article also proposes graphical medicine literacy as an extension of visual literacy: the ability to read comics not only as accessible illustrations but as layered medicovisual texts that shape how illness, evidence, testimony and care are understood.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148764136","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":"How is obstetric violence conceptualised and understood in the academic literature? A meta-narrative review.","authors":"Camilla Pickles, Gemma McKenzie, Bani Rikhraj","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013583","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Obstetric violence has emerged as a powerful yet contested term that describes harmful and abusive practices and institutional and systemic failings in reproductive healthcare. While its origins lie in Latin American legal and activist movements, the term has since entered English-language academic literature across multiple disciplines. This article presents a meta-narrative review of how obstetric violence has been conceptualised in scholarly work published in English. Drawing from research traditions spanning law, ethics, philosophy, medicine, midwifery, health research and the social sciences, we trace the evolution of the term and examine definitional trends, disciplinary variations and conceptual tensions.Our analysis reveals that obstetric violence is not a fixed or singular concept but an evolving and contested framework shaped by disciplinary perspectives, sociocultural contexts and ideological commitments. Definitions vary widely, with some scholars anchoring the term in the Venezuelan legal definition, while others resist formal definitions altogether, using obstetric violence as a tool to explore structural inequalities and systemic harms. Typologies are used inconsistently, functioning both as descriptive accounts and as structured lists that categorise different forms of harm across fields. We also highlight how universalising tendencies in the literature risk obscuring local realities and how the experiences of gender-diverse populations remain largely absent.Rather than resolving definitional ambiguity, the literature reveals how such ambiguity reflects the complexity of violence in reproductive healthcare and the different frameworks through which it is understood. Our review highlights that obstetric violence functions as a plural and evolving concept, shaped by varying disciplinary perspectives, social contexts and epistemic assumptions. This pluralism may complicate efforts to define or operationalise the term consistently across academic, legal and policy contexts, but it also reflects the unsettled nature of the field and the diversity of experiences it seeks to capture.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148670918","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":"At risk to be modern? HIV, cinema and the biopolitics of Indian masculinity.","authors":"Purbita Das","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-013916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-013916","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines how early 21st-century Indian short films reconfigure masculinity in the wake of economic liberalisation, non-governmental organisation-led public health interventions and the AIDS crisis. Reading Vishal Bhardwaj's <i>Blood Brothers</i> (2007) and Farhan Akhtar's <i>Positive</i> (2007) as cultural texts produced within pharmaceutical capitalism, the paper argues that these films do more than raise HIV awareness: they participate in the making of a biopolitical masculinity that ties male identity to risk management, medical compliance and therapeutic responsibility. Drawing on medical humanities, masculinity studies and Vinh-Kim Nguyen's concept of 'therapeutic citizenship' (2005), the article demonstrates how condom use, antiretroviral therapy and self-surveillance are framed as moral and civic obligations, rendering men governable, productive and socially legible. At the same time, these films negotiate older Hindu masculine ideals of restraint, family protection and bodily discipline, producing a tense overlap between renunciatory ethics and neoliberal imperatives of consumption and pleasure. Through close visual analysis, the paper traces how shame, guilt and responsibility circulate as affects that must be managed, displaced or transformed in order to sustain this new masculine order. By situating these films within India's HIV landscape, the paper advances medical humanities scholarship on gender and health and opens new avenues for studying how cinematic narratives shape the emotional and ethical labour of becoming a 'therapeutic' male citizen in contemporary India.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148649496","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":"Buddhist Therapeutics and The New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care: a social science of mindfulness.","authors":"Steven Quach","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-013829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2026-013829","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawing on a 2-year ethnography at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (NYZCCC, 2020-2022), this article examines the growth of online Dharma groups developing amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. At meetings, contemplative practices (eg, meditation and mindfulness) are made amenable to secular expectations of mental healthcare. Treating these as social productions, rather than biomedical reproductions, of mind, I describe <i>Buddhist Therapeutics</i> as the process in which experiences of moral injury resulting from systemic inequity are collectively authenticated as aspects of mental health. This article illustrates how Dharma sharing activates its participants to confront the status quo, including matters related to the #MeToo movement, the murder of George Floyd, the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the rise of anti-Asian American hate crimes. Ultimately, I position Buddhist Therapeutics in a genealogy of injury and repair beginning with the division between mind and body in European philosophy.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148562902","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":"Endometriosis and postdigital health practices.","authors":"Julia M Abraham, Rajasekaran V","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2025-013341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2025-013341","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper aims to analyse selected online narratives of women with endometriosis who leverage the affordances of these platforms to share their lived experiences. Through discourse analysis, this study critically engages with the pictures, reels, captions and comments that appear on these online environments to scrutinise how they become spaces of co-creation, education, advocacy and empowerment. The paper borrows from Monika Pietrzak-Franger's concept of 'postdigital health practices' to look at how knowledge production and circulation occur in online environments, with special focus on Instagram, while further extending to briefly include podcasts, YouTube videos and independent websites. Following Franger's definition of 'postdigital', the paper investigates the integration of digital technologies into everyday practices, the digital as discursive and the dynamic power relations created through them. The researchers attempt to close read the online accounts of illness experiences shared by four women with endometriosis, Emma Maxwell, Raphaella, Rebekah and Amy Corfeli, to highlight the serialisation, multimodality and transmediality of the shared content and look at how various ways of articulation aid in better expressions of these experiences. The paper looks at how these individuals navigate their everyday lives, how they fight their insecurities and embrace their ill bodyminds. Systematic analysis of these data provides insights into how illness and health are represented, communicated and conceived. The findings suggest that these embodied expressions may function as informal digital advocacy and community-building. While the sample size precludes claims about systemic change, the analysis demonstrates the value of attending to serial, multimodal and transmedial forms of illness narration in endometriosis discourse. The paper proposes that such practices warrant further investigation as potential sites of experiential knowledge circulation and peer support.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148593995","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":"Redemptive narratives of remission: agency, free will and type 2 diabetes in the era of Ozempic.","authors":"Kieran Fionn Murphy","doi":"10.1136/medhum-2026-014041","DOIUrl":"10.1136/medhum-2026-014041","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>A tension between free will and determinism shapes narratives of type 2 diabetes and obesity, contributing to stigma and defining how these conditions are culturally understood.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>This research involved an interdisciplinary analysis drawing on philosophy, narrative theory and illness narrative scholarship. It undertakes close readings of two remission memoirs-William Banting's <i>Letter on Corpulence</i> (1863) and Tom Watson's <i>Downsizing</i> (2020)-in dialogue with Augustine's redemptive and conversion narrative, <i>Confessions</i>.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Discourses of metabolic illness oscillate between models of personal responsibility and biological determinism. Subjects are both blamed and rendered passive. In contrast, Banting's and Watson's remission memoirs mobilise a redemptive narrative form structured by deficiency, transformation and renewal. The two texts, written a century and a half apart, assert the authors' agency while positioning them as generative people who seek to transform others. They contest dominant biomedical and institutional narratives that marginalise patient voice and prioritise clinical authority.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>This article links two memoirs of metabolic illness to a tradition of redemptive story-telling, asking for a rethinking of agency, responsibility and transformation regarding type 2 diabetes. There are implications for both clinical practice and cultural understanding.</p>","PeriodicalId":46435,"journal":{"name":"Medical Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148353724","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}