Journal of Medical Humanities最新文献

Exploring the putative role of nature in human well-being has typically been operationalized and measured within a quantitative paradigm of research. However, such approaches are limited in the extent to which they can capture the full range of how natural experiences support well-being. The aim of the study was to explore personal experiences in nature and consider how they might be important to human health and well-being. Based on a descriptive phenomenological analysis of fifty descriptions of memorable moments in nature from England, Indonesia, and Norway, our findings illustrate a common structure presented under three themes: 1. serenity that gives rise to a growing awareness of how the body is stimulated by the senses; 2. admiration and appreciation for the sensation of beauty; 3. an emerging sense of togetherness and deep emotional bonding. The findings are discussed using the concepts of ecological time and the ecological body, which foreground being in nature as constituted as an interdependent and dynamic human process. We conclude by understanding well-being in terms of human responsiveness to their surroundings and thus as rooted in the human condition.

Jane Austen normally avoids discussing appearance throughout her works. Persuasion constitutes the exception to the rule, as the story focuses on the premature aging experienced by her protagonist, Anne Elliot, seemingly due to disappointed love. Much has been written about Anne’s “loss of bloom,” but never from the perspective of psychoneuroimmunology, the field that researches the interrelation between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems. In this paper, we adopt a perspective of psychoneuroimmunology to argue that Austen established a connection between psychological distress, specifically lovesickness, and the development of early senescence signs, and vice versa, since the recovery of love is associated with happiness and physical glow. From a gender perspective, we discuss how Austen brightly reflected these interrelationships through the story of Anne, when the latest psychoneuroimmunological research has actually shown that women age earlier than men as a consequence of psychological turmoil.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson is mostly remembered as a poet, activist, and ex-wife of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her volume The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899) has been largely overshadowed as a result. Yet, the collection contains a portfolio of heroines analogous and contemporaneous to the famed New Woman figure of the fin de siècle. In this article, I consider Dunbar-Nelson’s heroines in light of their New Woman-esque agency and autonomy as they find remedies and power in objects and materials steeped in New Orleans’s cultural heritage. Ceded neither social nor political self-governance nor domestic comfort, this article reads these transcendental, metaphysical objects as sources of self-care. With close analysis of “The Goodness of St. Rocque,” “Tony’s Wife,” and “Little Miss Sophie,” I argue that Dunbar-Nelson’s protagonists exert influence over their lives, specifically in the negotiation of romantic relationships, through voodoo charms, Catholic candles, tarot cards, sewing machines, and knitting needles. Covering courtship, break-ups, and unhappy marriages, I demonstrate the ways in which these empowering spiritual objects respond to health concerns, including malnutrition and domestic violence, in turn, situating them as alternatives to patriarchal and historically racist medical institutions. Valorizing the cultural milieu of New Orleans and the customs of the Caribbean and European heritage, and thereby conveying Dunbar-Nelson’s resistance to white and male supremacist ideologies in late-nineteenth-century Southern America, the article ultimately assesses the parallels with (predominantly white) New Woman fiction, through shared themes of fraught heterosexual dynamics and women’s declining health.

Health disparities education is an integral and required part of medical professional training, and yet existing curricula often fail to effectively denaturalize injustice or empower learners to advocate for change. We discuss a novel collaborative intervention that weds the health humanities to the field of health equity. We draw from the health humanities an intentional focus retraining provider imaginations by centering patient narratives; from the field of health equity, we draw the linkage between stigmatized social identities and health disparities. We describe a longitudinal health equity curriculum for the Hospice and Palliative Medicine fellowship in Memphis, Tennessee, to give trainees exposure to the concept of structural violence and how it affects clinical care. The curriculum was developed in partnership with humanities and social sciences faculty who staff a Health Equity academic program at a small liberal arts college in Memphis. This curriculum has been implemented for the past four years in support of 22 hospice and palliative medicine fellows. Group debriefs and a mixed methods survey have revealed widespread and lasting impact towards understanding health equity concepts, enhanced communication and treatment of patients, and empowerment to address the broader needs and policies affecting patients and the communities in which they live. Ultimately, we model an educational initiative that integrates equity across the full scope of healthcare practice and equips learners with skills for sustaining compassionate practices, focusing on equity-oriented, person-centered care across the full scope of healthcare practice.

Informed by medical science and biotechnology, Karoline Georges's novel Under the Stone offers a reflection on suffering bodies and imagines responses to an overwhelming sense of fear and passivity that embodied trauma and the world's many crises can create. In line with the editors' reclaiming of the milieu for the medical humanities, I draw on Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy and Sara Ahmed's notions of stranger and encounter for reading the novel's spatialization of oppressive power dynamics and its imagination of subversive emergence. I also complicate the literary text's discourse on space and body by relying on wonder studies to examine further its alternative forms of careful attunement enacted through the protagonist's affective and disembodied awakening, the latter fueled by his escape from "the incessant movement of automatic components that delineat[e] [his] presence in the world" (Georges 2016, 61). Happening from and because of the Tower's milieu, this escape becomes a mitigating force to physical, affective, and social struggles. I thus contend that Georges's text provides thought-provoking material about the functions and effects of art for addressing the dangers and promises of bioethics, body sovereignty, and life protection.

Culture, health, and medicine intersect in various ways-and not always without friction. This paper examines how liberal multicultural states ought to interact with diverse communities which hold different health-related or medical beliefs and practices. The debate is fierce within the fields of medicine and bioethics as to how traditional medicines ought to be regarded. What this debate often misses is the relationship that medical traditions have with cultural identity and the value that these traditions can have beyond the confines of the clinical setting. This paper will attempt to bring some clarity to the discussion. In so doing, it will delve into some controversial areas: (1) the debate around whether liberal states ought to embrace multiculturalism, (2) the existence and nature of group-differentiated rights, (3) the question of whether healthcare systems ought to embrace medical pluralism, and (4) what this would entail for policymakers, clinicians, and patients. Ultimately, I argue that liberal democratic states with multicultural populations ought to recognize medical pluralism as a matter of respecting group-differentiated and individual human rights.

Working in healthcare can be fulfilling, meaningful, and sometimes exhausting. Creative endeavors may be one way to foster personal resilience in healthcare providers. In this article, we describe an annual arts and humanities program, the Ludwig Rounds, developed at a large academic children's hospital. The event encourages staff to reflect on resilience by sharing their creative work and how it had an impact on their clinical careers. The multidisciplinary forum also allows staff to connect and learn about each other. We discuss the development of the program, its format and logistics, and lessons learned over the past 15 years.

This essay analyzes the visualization of Euro-American medicine and indigenous healing in John Steinbeck's 1941 documentary-drama The Forgotten Village. The movie juxtaposes film and medical discourse as exemplifications of modern, visual culture by showing excerpts from hygiene films and foregrounding medical imagery (e.g., bacteria cultures). The film displaces indigenous medicine by privileging a Euro-American medical model, and the gaze of oppression is perpetuated through humanitarian medical intervention. In short, disease is not simply a material fact but embedded in discourses about community identity, moral values, and politics.

This article is an investigation of neurodivergent reading practices. It is a collectively written paper where the focus is as much on an autoethnographic exploration of our autistic readings of autism/autistic fiction as it is on the read texts themselves. The reading experiences described come primarily from Yoon Ha Lee's Dragon Pearl (2019) and Dahlia Donovan's The Grasmere Cottage Mystery (2018), which we experience as opposite each other in how they depict their neurodivergent characters and speak to us as autistic readers. Through the article, we describe a formation of neurodivergent (critical) collective readings of autism/autistic fiction. The article contributes to an academic and activistic discourse around neurodivergent reader responses and power relations between neurodivergent and neurotypical readers and authors.