Journal of Medical Humanities最新文献

This essay examines the breast cancer accounts of four Arab female celebrities who have spoken out in public about their illness experience: the Egyptian TV presenter Basma Wahba and the actress Yasmine Ghaith, the Iraqi actress Namaa al-Ward, and the Lebanese pop singer Elissa. By reading their testimonies against the backdrop of critical literature on illness narratives and memoirs, as well as on cancer narratives and activism, the essay asks: how are the accounts of these women’s cancer diagnosis and treatment disclosed and described? In what medium do they communicate and circulate their breast cancer experiences? What significance do these public disclosures have on challenging and breaking the Arab taboo of cancer? In conclusion, the essay argues that these women’s willingness to share their stories in public constitutes an important form of multimedia activist intervention—visual, sonic, and performative—that is playing a key role in the development of a breast cancer movement.

Despite the emerging evidence base to support the therapeutic potential of creative writing and poetry for a variety of mental health problems, the therapeutic potential of poetry for people who have experienced psychosis remains poorly understood. The paper argues that by considering psychosis as meaningful poetics, this epistemological shift has the potential to foster curious inquiry and increase opportunities for meaningful dialogue. The paper introduces and explores the concept of the ‘poetic wavelength’, building on the previously established notion of the psychotic wavelength, which proposes that others need to ‘tune in’ to what is being communicated through psychosis. The concept of the poetic wavelength suggests that the reading and writing of poetry may support this process of ‘tuning in’ both for those experiencing psychosis and those working therapeutically with them.

In a widely cited 2017 study, Robinson et al. (2017) found that 'emotionally expressive' writing makes physical wounds heal faster when compared to writing that did not engage the emotions. The Writing Long COVID project at Aberystwyth University engaged similar territory in a recent pilot study. Participants' writing activities explored how literary production can affect a person's experience of this new chronic condition, as well as contribute to our understanding of its symptoms. In this short essay, I show how we designed a course of short-duration online workshops that increased accessibility for people with Long COVID-related fatigue. I also argue that future Long COVID creative activities should let their timing, venue, content, and structure be influenced by the preferences of the Long COVID patient. The preliminary study suggests that the traditional parameters of the writing workshop, including its duration, could deter participation in potentially beneficial creative activities.

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.

In this narrative essay, a happenstance encounter with a journal article rekindles the author's intense memories of a cardiac resuscitation 25 years earlier during internship. Recollections of observations, emotions, and professional interactions around this event prompt reflection about the painful experiences from training that remain seared into memory and the value of  these formative moments across a professional lifetime.

The Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (JEDIB) committee formed in 2022 in order to support diversity and inclusion in the Health Humanities Consortium and to advance best practices for equity and inclusion in the field of medical and health humanities. This Forum Essay describes our first year of work, including participant-led commitment statement crafting and strategic planning. Health humanities-specific JEDIB work is described in detail in essays about disability justice; gender, sex, sexuality, and reproductive justice; and Indigeneity from a decolonial standpoint. The authors offer transferable techniques for other organizations and institutions with particular attention to heath care and health professions education. Another essay analyzes US institutional and demographic data to show that as an academic program, health humanities gives robust indicators of contributing significantly to student diversity and inclusive success in higher education and medical education. The Forum closes with a reflection on joining the work of equity and inclusion and what new priorities and awareness can emerge to inform health equity scholarship and epistemic justice.

Proposed educational outcomes for the health humanities in medical education range from empathy to visual thinking skills to social accountability. This lack of widely agreed-upon high-level curricular goals limits humanities educators' ability to design purposeful curricula toward clear, common ends and threatens justifications for scarce curricular time. We propose a novel approach to the hoped-for outcomes of health humanities training in medical schools, which has the potential to encompass traditional health humanities knowledge, skills, and behaviors while also being concrete and measurable: humanistic practice. Humanistic practice, adapted from the concept of ethical sensitivity, is an intentional process of applying humanities knowledge and skills to a clinical scenario by 1) noticing that the scenario requires humanities knowledge or skills, 2) informing one's clinical and interpersonal strategy and behavior with humanities knowledge or skills, 3) reflecting on the effectiveness of the strategy and behavior, and 4) reorienting to develop new approaches for future practice. The construct of humanistic practice may help address some of the foundational problems in health humanities outcomes research since it transcends the traditional diverse content domains in the health humanities, can link patient and provider experiences, and may bridge the divide among the additive, curative, and intrinsic epistemic positions of humanities to medical education.