Journal of Medical Humanities最新文献

The last two decades have seen exponential growth in the number of US and Canadian health humanities programs. As an evolving field, there is significant variation across the structures and educational content of health humanities programs. This study was designed to solicit views from self-identified North American health humanities educators from academic programs. The primary aim was to garner broad perspectives on what distinguishes health humanities academic programs from other academic programs and what content programs should deliver to students. The goal was to distill defining features and parameters of a high-quality health humanities educational program, inquiring in particular about knowledge, skills, and values. Using Participatory Action Research methods, we conducted 14 focus group interviews composed of 89 participants. During phase one analysis, we applied 199 codes to interview transcripts, from which we identified 41 themes across seven domains: (1) Knowledge, (2) Education/Pedagogy, (3) Methodologic Approaches, (4) Skills, (5) Values, (6) Disciplinarity, and (7) Institutional Limitations/External Restrictions. Phase two analysis discerned that these themes inform five overarching themes that cross domains and educational levels: (1) Interdisciplinarity, (2) Internal Inquiry, (3) External Examination, (4) Praxis, and (5) Transformative Education. Our findings suggest that even though health humanities may have neither canonical knowledge bases nor universal methodologies, overarching themes speak to a consensus of field-level priorities that transcend programmatic variation. Further research is needed to improve tools and standards to aid in the growth, assessment, and evaluation of health humanities educational programs.

Written during a medical leave of absence from medical school, "self-portrait by way of erosion" is a reconciliation with loss of self and a representation of gradual surrender. The title was inspired by Ocean Vuong's "self-portrait as exit wounds," a favorite poem of the author's. "self-portrait by way of erosion" was selected as the 2nd place winner for the 2025 William Carlos Williams poetry competition, which recognizes and promotes a focus of the humanities in medicine. In the company of esteemed poets, Sara Khan and Makeen Yasar, the author presented this poem at the annual competition ceremony, invoking the question of what it means to accept or even befriend pain, especially when that pain seems invisible to others.

Written during a medical leave of absence from medical school, "self-portrait by way of erosion" is a reconciliation with loss of self and a representation of gradual surrender. The title was inspired by Ocean Vuong's "self-portrait as exit wounds," a favorite poem of the author's. "self-portrait by way of erosion" was selected as the 2nd place winner for the 2025 William Carlos Williams poetry competition, which recognizes and promotes a focus of the humanities in medicine. In the company of esteemed poets, Sara Khan and Makeen Yasar, the author presented this poem at the annual competition ceremony, invoking the question of what it means to accept or even befriend pain, especially when that pain seems invisible to others.

This article explores narrative as a feature of medical research writing and a means of incorporating patient-authored "perspectives" into the discourse of health and medicine. Focusing on published case reports that include a distinctive section devoted to the patient's perspective, I specifically examine how practitioner and patient narratives configure cases in different ways: the former based on conventions associated with clinical reporting; the latter based on embodied experience with illness and clinical care. My analysis shows how these perspectives can be both generative and limiting. On the one hand, they broaden the reach of patient narratives via inclusion in the research literature, and on the other hand, they have potential to conceptualize patient experience as mere perspective, supplementing the practitioner's sanctioned account rather than adding explanatory value to the case on its own terms. Acknowledging these challenges, I theorize narrative as a site of rhetorical possibility that recognizes the value of patient stories without unduly placing practitioners and patients on opposing sides of an expert/non-expert divide. The article concludes by suggesting avenues for development in areas of research, education, and clinical practice.

A follicle is a small cavity, sac, or gland out of which growth occurs. Hairs grow out of follicles, as do humans. The follicle, like the womb, is a speculative container of potential life. A menstruating woman loses numerous follicles with each cycle-only one will release an egg, and rarely is that egg fertilized. Medicine, technology, and big pharma have distorted this unlikely probability into a dominant narrative of, and social obsession with, reproductive futurity. With hormone stimulation, a standard part of the oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) process, one might produce numerous mature follicles and thus numerous eggs. Freezing then becomes a way both to preserve and heighten the fantasy of potentiality, thus circumventing Sabina Spielrein's notion that, in the reproductive instinct, there is also always already an instinct toward death ("Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being," 1912). Theorizing the follicle as both a space of speculation and of death, "reproductive cryopower" then refers to the biopolitics of cryogenic reproduction. This essay looks at cryonics in literature and film alongside the historical overlap of cryonics with the eugenics movement, freezing's increased popularity since the 1960s, corporate investment in human oocyte cryopreservation to retain and profit off of "prime" female labor by postponing reproduction, and recent legislative decisions, all of which increasingly relocate reproductive agency from the individual to the state.