Journal of Medical Humanities最新文献

This creative engagement essay explores the interaction between a third-year medical student and a patient diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. The patient's experience is shaped by profound systemic inequities and institutional biases, including his incarcerated status, which significantly delayed and limited his access to medical care. His case highlights the systemic inadequacies within the USA prison healthcare system, where timely and adequate treatment is often unavailable. Beyond the medical aspects of his illness, the patient's emotional journey, particularly his inability to communicate with his family during this critical time, is explored. Through this narrative, the essay underscores the importance of humanism in medicine-bearing witness to each patient's story, recognizing their dignity, and acknowledging the broader sociocultural context that shapes their healthcare experiences.

This article explores the shifting and competing ways in which childbirth, obstetrics, and maternity care were represented during the first two decades of television in Sweden. While childbirth on screen has a much longer history in both educational film and commercial cinema, the introduction of public service television in the late 1950s created a new space in Sweden for both educational and critical representations of reproduction, which had the potential of reaching a much larger national audience than was previously possible. Analyzing various television formats dealing with and displaying births from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, this article examines how pregnant and birthing bodies were made visible in the new medium of television and what role these programs played in the larger debates on maternity care, obstetrics, and the Swedish welfare state in this period. Centrally, the article discusses the shift from a mode of representation in which childbirth was depicted within the framework of sex education or information about the welfare society's support systems to feminist representations giving voice to women's experiences and criticizing the medicalized perspective on childbirth found in Swedish healthcare. In this way, the article highlights shifting historical discourses of childbirth within the frames of a public service institution and a Nordic welfare state and emphasizes the importance of moving images as both an art form and an influential communication tool in postwar discussions of healthcare issues.

This article examines historical polio outbreaks in three Dutch towns (1963, 1966, 1971) to show how vaccination refusal became an expression of and contribution to local solidarity shaped by religion, place, and tradition. In doing so, it demonstrates how medical history contributes to ongoing conversations in medical humanities about vaccination refusal. I argue that refusal was neither simply resistance nor misunderstanding but a deliberate act that reaffirmed local community boundaries. Drawing on archival research, I explore how public health interventions and national media scrutiny made previously unnoticed communities visible, fostering their collective self-awareness and sense of distinctiveness. Following Anna Tsing, I describe the productive yet uneasy interaction between national public health practices and local ways of living as an example of "friction." Historical analysis reveals how friction during vaccination campaigns brought these communities into public view, highlighting tensions between collective responsibility for public health and respect for traditional, place-specific ways of living. By emphasizing the spatial dimensions of refusal, I suggest that effective public health interventions may benefit from greater sensitivity to local cultural contexts.

This article engages with the immuno-political juxtaposition of the healthy self and the pathogenic other to critically examine the representation of Nazis and Jews in Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus (1996). Written as a postmemory narrative, Maus recounts the horrors experienced by the author's father Vladek Spiegelman as a survivor of the Holocaust that claimed an approximate six million Jewish lives. Beginning with the years leading up to World War II, Spiegelman's novel reimagines the discrimination, dislocation, and dehumanization suffered by Vladek and his family at various prison camps in Nazi-occupied Poland before being transferred to Auschwitz. Deploying an immuno-political reading of Maus, this article investigates how the Third Reich undertook a systematic extermination of the Jewish race by construing them as immunological nonself or pathogenic others. It further argues that Nazism's fantasy of constructing a racially aseptic German identity by eradicating the Jews as vermin or parasites was reinforced by the late nineteenth-century eugenicist ideologies of racial hygiene. This article finally considers how policies of excessive immunization that was deployed by Nazi biopolitics against the Jewish community, as well as exercised by the Jews to survive the Holocaust, eventually assumed the form of an autoimmune pathology that culminated with the attempted destruction of the entire medico-juridical infrastructure of the German Reich on the one hand and the fostering of suicidal tendencies by the Jewish survivors on the other.

Close-reading sequential comics and cartoons such as He Zhu's "Lockdown," Rivi Handler-Spitz's "Morning Commute," Yang Ji's "Quarantine," and Thi Bui, Will Evans, Sarah Mirk, Amanda Pike, and Esther Kaplan's "In/Vulnerable," this article investigates the networked spatial crises that have emerged during COVID-19. As the global pandemic reshaped social, economic, and cultural landscapes, it is crucial to understand the spatial implications of these transformations. By analyzing graphic medical texts, which serve as visual narratives that capture the lived experiences and perceptions of individuals within these crises, the present essay offers a nuanced exploration of the intricate relationships between space, society, and the effects of the pandemic. The article identifies and examines the various spatial crises that have emerged in the COVID era, such as disrupted urban environments, altered social dynamics, spaces of contamination, contraction of space, and the reconfiguration of workspaces. Drawing on theorists like Michael Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, this essay illustrates how these crisis-induced spatial transformations are represented, experienced, and contested. Ultimately, the article not only contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between the pandemic and space but also addresses the challenges of our evolving world.

The birth of modern gynecology in the USA is preceded by experimental exploitations of Black women's bodies in the mid-nineteenth century, entailing a long-drawn extraction of "reproductive knowledge" from enslaved patients. Charly Evon Simpson's Behind the Sheet (2019) stages the history of medical bondage of Black enslaved women in antebellum South, reconstructing the events that led to the surgical innovation for vesico-vaginal fistula. Scrutinizing Simpson's dramatization of the event, this paper prompts inquiries into the interplay of power and consent between the physician and the enslaved patient in plantation healthcare, highlighting the need to reexamine bioethical principles. Using the theoretical framework of medical gaze propounded by Foucault and further developed by Susan Greenhalgh, the paper analyzes the operation of white patriarchal power and the construction of physician heroism in the medical sphere. Investigating the realm of bodily autonomy in the context of medical bondage, the paper attempts to render a "herstorical" standpoint on the contributions of enslaved Black women to the field of gynecology.