Journal of Medical Humanities最新文献

This article examines two autobiographical texts that address the relationship between migration and struggles with mental health: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's The Undocumented Americans (2021) and Dina Nayeri's The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You (2020). Both memoirs help bring mental health issues to light in situations of precarity, and the texts indicate that it is not just the experience of physical dislocation that may cause or exacerbate struggles with mental health, but the disconnect from other people, from citizenship, and the nation itself. Nayeri and Cornejo Villavicencio do not focus on narratives of recovery or healing but provide space for the experiences of other undocumented migrants trying to navigate the European asylum system or difficulties in obtaining American citizenship. The article argues that the two authors use their experiences of migration and mental illness for greater advocacy purposes with regard to human rights. The struggles with mental health present in the two memoirs intertwine with the treatment of undocumented migrants as described by the two authors, going beyond the personal experience of mental health, or illness, connecting it with migration practices and policies in the United States and Europe.

Grey's Anatomy, one of the most-watched primetime medical dramas in the USA, has been on the air for two decades now. Though scholars have examined the influence the show has on medical students and the viewing public, the import of the narrative structure and genre conventions of the show in exerting that influence has been underanalyzed. In this article, I map the general narrative formula of the show, which positions doctors as the subjects and patients as the objects, in order to demonstrate how such a formula works to humanize physicians and consolidate biomedical authority. I focus specifically on narratives of pregnancy and childbirth in the show's earliest and most popular seasons to reveal the limits and possibilities of representing alternatives to medicalized birth within the genre constraints of medical drama. Ultimately, the result of investing only in doctors with subjectivity constitutes patients as the acted-upon, a formula that renders the agency over childbirth squarely in the hands of the physician. Such a representation has consequences, I argue, both for the viewing public's understanding of childbirth and for the roles doctors and birthing patients are expected to play.

The outbreak and impact of COVID-19 alert humans to the fragility of life and interpersonal bonds. The pandemic and its aftermath bring us not only disease and death but fear and suspicion. Enforced lockdown, quarantine, and isolation worldwide hampered and slowed down human interaction. However, epidemics also prompt us to rediscover valuable qualities inherent in our everyday lives despite the many problems. The retrieval of love in Maugham's The Painted Veil (1925) is a case in point. By reading Maugham's The Painted Veil via the lens of epidemics and their impact on humanity, this paper discusses how disease can precipitate rather than impede human interaction. The discussion will help shed light on the meanings and implications of love during and after epidemics.

A growing body of literature explores the intersection of eating disorders and identity formation-an entanglement that makes eating disorders particularly challenging to treat. Narrative medicine is a discipline of the health humanities that is interested in bearing witness to patients' stories with a closeness and rigor that enhances clinical care. The pedagogy of the field is the narrative medicine workshop, which mobilizes close-reading of works of art and reflective writing to improve our understanding of Self and Other. Narrative medicine workshops can be a compelling tool in enhancing the care of eating disorders by helping patients and their providers embrace uncertainty and challenge a singular narrative of illness. We facilitated parallel workshop series for patients and providers at a residential eating disorder treatment center and conducted qualitative interviews with four patients and three staff participants. Through a close read of participants' accounts, we constructed three themes: Phenomenology of Illness, Phenomenology of Change, and Orientation to Treatment. Group participants shared how workshops illuminated the embodied experience of eating disorders, fostered agency, and provided a sense of recognition and belonging. Providers particularly expressed newfound allyship with patients. This study highlights the value of narrative medicine workshops in shifting a patient's perspectives towards treatment and in promoting a patient-as-partner approach in the treatment of eating disorders-outcomes that situate the pedagogy of narrative medicine as a promising supplement to traditional eating disorder treatment.

The opioid crisis has continued despite efforts to intervene on its identified causes. In this article, we analyse responsibility claims in pain and addiction medical journals concerning the opioid crisis. Selected journals represent the opioid crisis as a medical problem. Using the method of discourse analysis, we examine 32 sampled articles from 3 medical journals published over the past decade to understand how the cause of the opioid crisis is represented. Drawing upon the sociological concept of responsibilization, we observe and explain two patterns in the responsibility claims. Pain medicine specialty journals tended to responsibilize physicians for their part in the crisis, whereas the addiction journal directed responsibility toward users. Despite some differences in proposed solutions, statements in both journals tend to responsibilize individual behaviours as the cause of the crisis. Accordingly, each article suggested solutions that target these behaviours. We argue that by focusing on individual behaviours, other factors and social conditions related to the crisis are omitted, including pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and health system infrastructure. We advocate for the need to redefine the assumptions related to the cause of the opioid crisis in order to consider alternative solutions.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) (1999-present) is a popular primetime drama that spotlights the use of genetic information to solve crimes. Despite the show's heavy reliance on the forensic use of DNA evidence, the role of genetics in defining family and identity arises in complex ways. Many episodes wrestle with social, ethical, and legal questions that reflect assumptions about genetic essentialism and genetic determinism, but counterarguments about the importance of non-biological relationships, social factors, and legal entitlements are given equal or greater weight. For this study, we identified and viewed 38 episodes from SVU's first twenty seasons centered on genetic themes in non-forensic contexts. Two recurring themes emerged: (1) that the role DNA plays is only one factor in a complex web of biological and social considerations that shape our understanding of kinship; and (2) that genetic predispositions to behavioral traits such as mental illness or violence should not be seen as obscuring the responsibility of personal choice. By treating genetics as a complex source of information requiring social context to be understood, SVU allows audiences to play an active role in interpreting its meaning.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spilled into the United States and spawned devastating outbreaks in Albany, Georgia, and multiple other cities, news media organizations served an important public health function. Journalists gathered and reported information about a new infectious disease peril, and they used increasing tolls of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as a shorthand form of risk communication. However, there were ample reasons from the start to question the completeness, accuracy, and fairness of the information that local news sources provided, and reporters repeated in numerous accounts of the Albany hotspot from March to July 2020. The story that went viral adhered to and supported a standard but strikingly deficient explanation of how novel infectious diseases wreak widespread havoc. The conventional outbreak narrative, exemplified by the Albany news coverage, frames causality, spread, and repercussions in ways that implicate personal behaviors while diminishing or disregarding population-level drivers of epidemics and the contribution of institutional lapses in healthcare safety. A second, closely related ramification of this responsibility framing is stigmatization of specific individuals or groups when they are singled out on the basis of an attribute, such as their race/ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, and identified as bearers and spreaders of a communicable disease. As the COVID-19 pandemic once again demonstrated, and the Albany story epitomizes, the conventional outbreak narrative sends strong stigma cues while leaving large gaps in the information needed to contend more equitably and effectively with emerging infectious diseases.

A first-year medical student's first patient is already dead. For decades, the cadaver, or body donor, has been the human body on which students first examine, cut, identify, and discover. That the student forms a detachment from the body and the person who once occupied the body, however, initiates a pedagogical series of events that is difficult to undo at best and may be harmful at worst. This process reveals gaps in the anatomical instruction process that present a missed opportunity to educate future physicians in a way that not only maintains their humanity and capacity for empathy but also enhances it. The anatomy lab should be a place where early medical students converse about death and begin to confront their own feelings of discomfort and hesitation. Relying on a metaphor of disappearance, as articulated by Jewson, this paper reframes this problem and offers new ways of improving human anatomy instruction through a brief examination of the history of anatomy in general, the history of the actual human being (body donor) in particular, and the response of the student through humanities-based interventions and content. In what follows, we consider the existing gaps, the possible curricular options for enhanced education, and the potential benefits of incorporating a more robust humanities curriculum in the anatomy laboratory for first-year medical students.