Journal of Medical Humanities最新文献

As Japan grapples with the pressing challenges of a super-aging society, understanding the lived experience of its older adults becomes imperative. This article centers on Diary of a Mad Old Man, a novel by renowned Japanese writer Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, written during the author's final years in post-World War II Japan. The text serves both as a reflection of its historical moment and as a precursor to the aging-related issues that would intensify after the 1970s. Employing a New Historicist approach, this study situates the novel's aging narratives within the broader postwar Japanese medical landscape, with a particular focus on biomedicine, the pharmaceutical industry, in-home nursing care, and medical pluralism-especially acupuncture. Special emphasis is placed on Japan's postwar transition from reliance on German pharmaceuticals to increasing confidence in its domestic pharmaceutical sector. The article argues that the biomedicalization of aging in postwar Japan increasingly pathologized old age, casting older adults as patients. However, this construction of patienthood was far from monolithic. Tanizaki's protagonist resists such categorization through his obsession with medical consumerism and his engagement with both biomedical and alternative therapies. By experimenting with various medications and treatments-while remaining impartial to them all-the protagonist emerges not as a passive recipient of care but as an informed and discerning consumer of medical interventions. These narrative accounts illustrate the capacity of older adults to navigate the rapidly changing medical landscape of postwar Japan and underscore the active roles patients can play in shaping their own healthcare experiences.

Communication and interaction with public authorities and healthcare professionals in Denmark primarily go through digital self-service platforms, requiring diverse skills and device access. In this article, we describe how senior citizens in Denmark handle and make sense of public digitalization through different forms of digital support. Through an ethnographic study of community-led initiatives of digital support, we highlight how senior citizens find socio-technical ways of managing digital obligations and argue that citizens' digital agency in day-to-day interactions with public digitalization relies heavily on distributed socio-material relations. We suggest that the ways of engaging with healthcare through digital means should be of increasing concern to medical humanities scholars, as digital literacies and technologies have become gatekeepers to welfare and healthcare. Drawing on Donna Haraway's reconceptualization of responsibility as response-ability, and Jane Bennett's notion of distributed agency, we argue that the ability of digital citizens to respond is a result of a distributed and combined responsiveness of human, technological, and digital actants. We point to two opposite but interrelated assemblages: public digital as distributed intervening mediated through computers, smartphones, tablets, public digital mail platforms, et cetera, and digital support as distributed response, which serves to mitigate and translate demands and obligations of the digitalized welfare state. Consequently, as digital developments tend to generate an increasingly individualizing gaze, medical humanities must be critically concerned with the manifold, subtle actants that co-constitute accessibility and responsiveness of patients and citizens.

The arts and humanities have recently been recognized as valuable tools in medical education. Despite this, there are few programs that leverage music, and even fewer that leverage classical music, to teach medical humanities concepts. Here, we designed a two-hour session in conjunction with a live classical string quartet to discuss themes related to identity, interprofessional education, active listening, and empathy. A survey consisting of ten statements was administered before and after the session. Fifty-seven first-year medical students participated in the session, and 35 students completed both surveys. Results show that students agreed that the shared experience of listening to music allowed them to practice interpersonal skills, understand the importance of listening in a clinical context, and reflect on their own perspectives and biases. A qualitative thematic analysis of student reflections proved that this exercise allowed for an increased appreciation of classical music as well as gained insight on the importance of empathetic listening in patient care.

In an early scene of Sarah Grand's novel The Beth Book, the child protagonist attempts to create a cure for rheumatism. Having read about the curative properties of snails in a "story of French life", she corks up garden snails in a blacking bottle and places them in the oven to render into "snail oil", envisaging rubbing patients with her product. This misguided attempt to create a cure explodes, and "boiling animal matter" bespatters the kitchen. This vignette indicates three previously overlooked topics that run through the novel. First is that Beth produces medical treatments and home remedies from a young age and continues to do so into adulthood. Second is the influence of the Family Herald magazine, which, I demonstrate, is fundamental in forming Beth's early medical interests. Finally, it foreshadows numerous other instances in which animal bodies function as material in the pursuit of healing and care. The Beth Book is a text of New Woman fiction, significant for its political and moral agendas in relation to the women's rights movement. In scholarship, this context tends to overshadow the medical culture, objects, and encounters which evidence day-to-day life in the novel. This article examines how ephemeral reading material and animals, both living and dead, function in acts of care and the pursuit of healing.

In the Biopolitics of Disability, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2015) assert that disabled people are subjected to endless health and government questionnaires that harvest their data in exchange for better care. As disability advocates such as the National Disability Rights Network (2021) have demonstrated, these questionnaires-like the 2020 census-are highly flawed because disabled populations are not asked to shape the questions that will determine government funding and access to medical care. Although data collection is a source of contemporary literary and scholarly interest, few works explore this in the context of disability. However, Jesse Ball's 2018 novel Census examines questionnaires, specifically the census, and illuminates how narratives of disability are warped by the faulty data these objects collect. I argue that the protagonist, a dying father whose son has Down syndrome and requires full-time care, uses what Jack Halberstam calls "queer failure" to create a more equitable census that will make possible the kinds of care disabled populations deserve. Rather than create a perfect, objective questionnaire, the father skews the questions and data to center disability in the story of America, as he moves away from recording everyone's experiences and instead highlights the lives of disabled people, their caretakers, and their systems of care (doctors, neighbors, etc.). I suggest that this "failed" census reveals those networks and systems of interdependency that scholars like Judith Butler (2020) and advocates such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) posit would radically change how care is approached, thus rendering the census as an object of care.

This reflective review examines the curatorial possibilities of bringing literary scholars, archivists, makers, and artists into dialogue through an exhibition organized by the Health Humanities Research Group at Loughborough University in 2023. We reflect on how material culture, visual art, historical objects, and archives are part of our practice as literary scholars and the collaborative potential this engenders. The objects on display ranged from historical pieces, such as an early modern birthing stool, to contemporary creative works, including textiles, found poems, and digital collages. Placing these different elements side by side allowed us to think about how material culture, literary criticism, and artistic practice can speak to one another. Together, the exhibition aimed to challenge any simplistic division between health and illness, instead drawing attention to the personal and shared stories that shape our experiences of the various stages of our lives.

Folding almanacs are magico-medical objects which were worn and used by doctors in fifteenth-century England to perform rituals of medicine and to align the timing of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment to earthly and cosmic cycles. As a multimedia artist, my curiosity was taken by these hand-held objects of care. To my contemporary eye, they are essentially artist books. A further connection came through my own lived experience of breast cancer. A year of intense treatment, including six cycles of chemotherapy followed by mastectomy, significantly complicated my relationship to my own body and to medicine. This creative engagement explores how and why I tried making my own folding almanacs, using modern materials, and what I learned when one of these was accepted for Un-boxing, an international travelling exhibition. These ancient folding almanacs encapsulate a world view where people's lived experiences of being in a body was held within a flow of relationships with other bodies, human and non-human including animals, the moon, stars and planets. A close reading of the visual and material languages I used in this remaking offers insights into a personal health history folded into bigger questions of what we might allow into an expanded field of 'medicine'.

This paper argues that the newspaper Notre Journal enshrined the importance of narrative in the revolutionary psychiatry of its founder and editor, Frantz Fanon. Anchoring my analysis in the interdisciplinarity of the medical humanities, I demonstrate how care at Hôpital Blida-Joinville in colonial Algeria was mediated by the written word. I examine Fanon's physician writing and editorial texts detailing the use of narrative approaches in the clinic. As an object of care, Notre Journal's promotion of psychic healing, social actions, and engaged professional practice shaped the interactions and experiences of patients and staff. Printed and distributed to the wider institution, the newspaper created community-during an oppressive French Occupation and at the outset of the War of Independence-in addition to nurturing creativity, curiosity, solidarity, and accountability. Still, Fanon would come to recognize the limits of narrative methods amidst cultural oral traditions, illiteracy, and divergent attitudes about narrating the self.