Journal of Medical Humanities最新文献

An autobiographical account of Jennifer Worth's life as a midwife in the East End of the 1950s, Call the Midwife (2002), explores a world populated largely by women. Worth's stories of motherhood's anxiety, pain, joy, and occasionally unspeakable grief are underscored by descriptions of the tools and surgical procedures performed by the dedicated midwives of Nonnatus House. This essay reflects on the construction of the figure of the midwife through the materiality of the objects and tools of her occupation, and the performance of surgical procedures. Worth's accounts of medical procedures or the use of tools establish the individuals of her narrative as midwives first, and as women second. In the eyes of everyone: mothers, fathers, and society as a whole, the midwife is defined by her profession, from her distinctive uniform to her skillset and tools, and by her commitment to her community. Drawing on the history of midwifery, thing theory, and the broader contexts of post-World War II London, this essay analyses Worth's text in relation to questions of female identity and thing theory.

Talk therapy is, by definition, difficult, if not impossible, to represent materially. Whereas other scholars have sought to do so by referencing Sigmund Freud's drawings or the setting of his consulting room, this article looks instead to the use of cloth in Joanne Greenberg's 1964 semiautobiographical novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. The two main treatments given to protagonist Deborah Blau were therapy sessions with Dr. Clara Fried, based on Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and the "cold pack," in which the patient was restrained and wrapped in sheets drenched with ice water. The two treatments, this article argues, can be considered in parallel, and through analysis of the material descriptions of the cold pack, one can learn more about the talking cure. Namely, this article analyzes the care in both cases as one of constraint, giving material form to the metaphorical "holding environment" of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Deborah uses the cold pack to endure her psychosis and return to reality. Similarly, Winnicott describes the ideal therapeutic space as one that, by its reliability, allows regression in service of finding a new self and distinguishing between fantasy and the outside world. The aim of this article is thus twofold: one, to further elucidate the role of cloth in treating mental distress, and two, to understand more fully the therapeutic relationship via the literal and figurative constraint of treatment.

This creative-critical piece reflects on the practices of recording, communicating, and caring that took place on social media and in digital spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using my own experience of contracting COVID-19 as a starting point, the piece looks at the ways in which epidemics have often been recorded in collaborative ways, with the personal, professional, and familial converging in historical texts that could be used as sources of medical authority. COVID-19 has similarly been immortalized across a variety of forms and by different communities. The piece particularly explores the ways in which collective epidemic experience has been represented online through autopathographical Tweets, TikTok cures, and group chat messages and the future purposes that such collaborative patient narratives can serve.

This article examines the clinical care communication between Lucia Joyce (the daughter of James Joyce) and Carl Jung in Annabel Abbs's The Joyce Girl. This paper particularly scrutinises how Lucia employs Jung's clinically prescribed mechanism of memoir-writing as a tool for patient empowerment and for exercising agency in talking cure sessions. Abbs's novel opens with Lucia's descent from being damned to fame with her triumphant and enchanting performance as a mermaid at the Bal Bullier to being doomed to quit dancing. The novel creatively resurrects Lucia's emotional turmoil on leaving dancing, familial turbulence, failure of romantic pursuits, and her eventual inescapability from clinical confinement. Between the extremes of a chaotic familial environment and a disciplined clinical restraint, Jung's prescription of memoir-writing is the only cathartic and artistic culvert for Lucia to express her suppressed trauma and unbridled emotions. This paper discusses how Lucia employs Jung's clinical prescription of memoir-writing as a mode of self-care and a tool to exercise her agency, thereby, following the good patient script.

In The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, Virginia Held asserts that those in the position to care should exercise power in ways that avoid violence and damage, and that trust and mutuality should be fostered in place of benevolent domination. With reference to Held's idea of relational care, this essay close reads J. M. Coetzee's depiction of prosthesis refusal in Slow Man as a nuanced critique of caring actions that are devoid of relationality. At the center of the novel is the character Paul Rayment's refusal to get fitted with a prosthetic leg after a cycling accident. He reasons that it is dishonest to give others the false impression that he is not without a leg, even if the price he must pay for "honesty" includes giving up the chance to cycle again and the quality of life he had before the accident. But Coetzee is at pains to highlight that Rayment is a confused character, and behind the confused narrative of "honesty" lies a subtext of rebellion. Specifically, this is a rebellion against care without relationality. It provokes the question, in the absence of ill intention toward the care recipient could caring actions be perfectly benign? In this article, I read the refused prosthetic leg as more than a phantasmagorical symbol of the depicted healthcare professionals' seemingly empty appearance of care; it foregrounds relationality as the critically missing substance that could render caring actions unethical in the novel.

Modernist literature of the early to mid-twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic is replete with examples of a particular kind of relationship with objects, namely, the touching, collecting, and grasping of small, often highly personal, and ostensibly quotidian objects. From John's glass collection in Woolf's "Solid Objects," Peter Walsh's stroking of his pocket-knife in Mrs. Dalloway, Miriam's frenzied absorption with flowers in Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, to Laura's fiddling of her glass menagerie in Tennessee Williams's eponymous play, fidgeting in modernist literature and drama reveals a particular tendency of not just characters' possession of things but also their possession by things. This phenomenon, I argue, allows characters to practice care as they withdraw from oppressive narratives of normalcy and (economic and biological) productivity, challenging their exclusionary and othering configurations. My paper looks at fidgeting in The Glass Menagerie as a part of this larger ideological and haptic orientation in modernist literature. The care invested by Laura in her intimate relationship with these "playthings" allows her to intercept not only male narrativizing forces and articulation of herself but also the rhetoric of productivity that circulates both within the play and in the larger economic backdrop of post-depression America. My paper attempts to foreground these objects of care in our readings of the play and modernist texts in general and, in so doing, highlight their importance as lenses of analysis that render visible alternate forms of agency and resistance. Lastly, it attempts to reframe fidgeting as an act of embodied refusal, evoking the radical potential of refusal within feminist and disability studies.

The role of fiction in enabling care for people who self-harm is primarily framed as a relation of protection through absence or avoidance. It is frequently suggested that fiction should avoid depicting self-harm, lest it encourage readers to begin self-harming, framing those who self-harm as passive and in need of protection. This paper will demonstrate that when the perspectives of people who self-harm are centred in the analysis of texts and their effects, the practice of reading and viewing fiction emerges as a more active, creative, and relational experience, which brings self-harm close rather than holding it at a distance. Indeed, such active engagement through material practices like zine-making, event attendance, and repeated viewing of a singular scene is understood as that which makes care possible. Through a novel interdisciplinary approach, this brings together sociological and literary methods to explore the dynamic relation between a text and its effects. Drawing on both qualitative interviews with people with experience of self-harm and close readings of creative texts including the Showtime TV series The L Word (2004-2009) and Andrea Gibson's poem 'I Sing The Body Electric, Especially When My Power's Out' (2011), the paper traces the complex relation between texts and the care they make possible. Thus, I extend existing theorisations of care as intimate and relational to the context of self-harm. Specifically, I outline the way in which care is not predetermined, singular, and universal, and explore the ways that a relation of care can be invited by aesthetic qualities.

Recently, a beekeeper discovered the metabolic wizardry of wax worms, their ability to decompose polyethylene. While this organism has usually been perceived as a model organism in science or a pest to beekeepers, it acquired a new mode of being as potentially probiotic, inviting us to dream of a future without plastic waste. In this paper, I explore how wax worms are entangled with material practices of care and narratives that give meaning to these practices. These stories, however, are marked by manipulation, exploitation, and extermination, and call for a questioning of our modes of caring. Consequently, I offer a counter-narrative that questions our anthropocentric practices of caring and the stories we attach to them. Borrowing Puig de la Bellacasa's notion of ecopoetics, I tell another story based on my participation in the making of an art installation hosting wax worms. The installation creates an opening of a world of curiosity and cultivates a sensibility for wax worms expanding their modes of being and our capabilities of appreciation. In the end, I argue that by mattering and storying differently, we have the opportunity to challenge anthropocentric interests and make a different world of caring and co-existence possible.

This article analyzes the immediate and long-term effects of medical humanities teaching at a Swedish medical degree program. The objectives, format, and core pedagogical ideas and practices of an elective course in medical humanities are presented, situating the learning experience in the wider context of medical humanities in the Nordics. We conducted a qualitative, thematic analysis of course evaluations amassed over 15 years and of open-ended responses in an alumni survey sent out in 2023. Using these two sources, we compare the students' immediate perception of medical humanities' contribution to their education with what they discern when looking back. The students report that medical humanities teaching advances an understanding and responsiveness to narratives and furthers an ability to balance the rational, bio-medical perspective with a more holistic empathetic view of patients and illness, providing a deeper and broader toolkit to work from in clinical practice. The students perceive that they have acquired a specific expertise, obtained training in perspective taking, and yielded personal growth and agency. The interpretative sensitivities and competencies reverberated in the alumni survey and were reported to influence subsequent clinical work. Our study suggests that the impact of medical humanities teaching is transferred to both occupational practice and personal life, and that the impact is long term.

This paper describes the potential of an art-based tool to enhance pain assessment, communication, and management in healthcare settings. It elucidates a novel tool, artistic pain exploration (APE), for healthcare providers to gain deeper insights into the subjective experiences and expressions of pain beyond traditional clinical assessment tools. We propose that visual art offers an expressive conduit to communicating and understanding not just the nature of pain but also each patient's unique experience. Using Edvard Munch's seminal and visceral painting, The Scream, as a case study, we demonstrate that the APE tool can be used both at the bedside and in health profession education. The APE tool is currently being evaluated in a randomized controlled trial involving surgical patients with temporomandibular disorders (TMD), further exploring its clinical utility. The paper argues that integrating art into clinical practice and education fosters more patient-centered care and presents a flexible, adaptable framework for understanding pain across diverse healthcare contexts and cultural backgrounds.