Medical Humanities最新文献

Phobias unsettle not only the emotions but the cognitive and linguistic structures through which fear is experienced and expressed. This article examines how contemporary memoirs, Sarah Chihaya's Bibliophobia, Nicolette Heaton-Harris's Living with Emetophobia: Coping with Extreme Fear of Vomiting, Sara Benincasa's Agorafabulous! Dispatches from my bedroom and Russell Norris's Red Face: How I Learnt to Live with Social Anxiety, translate the somatic immediacy of panic into language. Drawing on Mary Helen Immordino-Yang's Emotion-Cognition Framework, which proposes that emotional and reflective systems are neurally interdependent, the study identifies integration nodes: moments in the text where sensory chaos and self-reflective commentary converge. These nodes mark the transformation of panic into narrative thought, showing how linguistic markers such as causal connectives, temporal shifts and ironic self-observation mediate between affective arousal and conceptual understanding.Through close reading and cognitive stylistic analysis, the article demonstrates that phobic memoirs enact, rather than merely describe, the process of cognitive-emotional regulation. Fragmented syntax and recursive phrasing reproduce the physiology of panic, while humour and irony re-establish agency by reframing fear as discourse. Across all four memoirs, phobia emerges not as a static pathology but as a dynamic linguistic event in which narrative enables emotional integration. The study argues that recognising these textual mechanisms can enrich clinical approaches to anxiety disorders by foregrounding narrative as a medium of adaptation and repair.

This article explores the historical and theoretical relationship between chiropractors and conspiracy theory belief. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous journals published articles warning readers about chiropractic conspiracy theories targeting the mRNA vaccine, and for people to approach disproved medical practice with scepticism. COVID-19's persistent threats prevented further considerations of the anticonspiratorial roots of chiropractic and therefore some of the most significant explanations for some strands of chiropractic's steadfast commitment to the margins of standardised medical care. From its inception, chiropractic's architects have positioned it against mainstream medicine and under perpetual threat from legitimating medical institutions like the American Medical Association (AMA). This article recounts chiropractic's anticonspiratorial roots and its turbulent relationship with the AMA before considering some chiropractic conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although conspiracy theories are common among chiropractic's founding text, the AMA bears some responsibility for the current state of chiropractic conspiracy theories. The purpose of this article is to inform policy makers, evidence-based chiropractors and researchers about the historical roots of conspiracy theories within chiropractic medicine and the ways that standardised medicine encouraged anticonspiratorial beliefs among chiropractors in its efforts to undermine 'alternative' medicine. Without careful consideration of these historical factors, critics risk misidentifying the motivating factors for chiropractic conspiracy theories and therefore risk perpetuating some harmful trends within some strands of chiropractic care. This analysis is especially relevant given the meteoric rise of the wellness industry and its influence on American politicians encouraging suspicion of standardised healthcare. While such developments demand their own specific analyses, this article's historical exploration of the connection between chiropractic and conspiracy theories will be relevant to those interested in better understanding the sordid history between standardised and alternative medicines and how the popular dismissal of alternative medicines as inherently untrustworthy or irrational risks intensifying the divide.

This article compares William Carlos Williams's short story 'The Use of Force' (1938) and Tess Gerritsen's novel The Surgeon (2001) to explore how biomedical care can slide into coercion and how clinical spaces oscillate between sanctuary and sacrilege. Building on Michel Foucault's formulation of clinical vision, together with Julia Kristeva's account of abjection and René Girard's sacrificial theory, I propose a three-strand analytic-power/knowledge, Gothic embodiment and parareligious affect-supplemented by an ecoGothic perspective that scales clinical violence from flesh to environment. Through close reading, the essay shows how Williams's intimate house call converts beneficent intention into brute force, while Gerritsen's medical thriller grotesquely weaponises medical expertise: the gaze that sees also dominates, and instruments of cure-tongue depressor, spoon, scalpel-become ritual implements that breach bodily borders. Attending to gendered vulnerability and trauma poetics, the analysis situates Gerritsen's femicidal surgeries within patriarchal control and foregrounds the counter-agency of Jane Rizzoli and Catherine Cordell. Placing a modernist vignette beside a 21st century medical thriller, the article maps both continuities and ruptures in the ontological, epistemic and ethical stakes of clinical authority, tracing how sacrificial logic, secular priesthood and toxic ecologies persist across periods. The contribution is twofold: to Gothic studies, by clarifying medicine's parasacral volatility and its ecological imaginaries; and to bioethics and the medical humanities, by articulating a normative claim that only practices disciplined by consent, narrative reciprocity and institutional accountability can sustain the secular covenant of care. Otherwise, curative ritual hardens into authorised brutality, and knowledge is purchased through a sacrificial economy in which cura collapses into cruelty. Such findings refine debates on clinical paternalism, narrative ethics and trauma representation in literature.

Since 2017, more than 600 000 Rohingya have sought refuge in Bangladesh, as Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN), in registered camps or improvised settlements in Cox's Bazar. Although humanitarian responses have significantly improved in the past decades, coordination gaps remain between health and non-health sectors (eg, little is known about the impacts of shelter or protection responses on refugee health). We thus aimed to explore FDMN perspectives on issues affecting their health to help inform health system responses to mass displacement in Cox's Bazar.We conducted photo-elicitation interviews with 39 FDMN in Kutupalong and Balukhali camps. Each participant-researcher pair photographed three to five images of participants' lived environment, then participants described each photograph and why chosen in interviews. We analysed data thematically.Participants reflected daily difficulties and indignities, due to open sewerage and limited potable water, alongside health and safety risks (eg, flimsy and insecure shelters, gas leaks), particularly for children, older people and those with special needs. Health services were reportedly basic and sometimes unfriendly. Participants advocated for health and safety improvements, providing photographic evidence of the risks they experienced daily.Photo-elicitation was valuable for visualising participants' daily lives and provided participants with a means to advocate for improvements in undignified and risky living conditions. Interviews enabled articulation of perceived effects on physical and mental health and recurrent themes of 'abandonment', with limited services and few pathways for change. Highlighting Rohingya experiences can help identify ways to improve living conditions, services and well-being.

The arts and humanities can direct attention to the health-threatening effects of adverse living and working conditions and the political and economic systems that spawn them. In pursuit of this goal, we presented 15 undergraduate health studies students and alumni with drawings by artist Georg Grosz that depicted the profound social inequalities of Weimar-era Germany and then had them explore the relevance of these drawings to the present-day Canadian scene. Students found the eight drawings which depicted topics of (1) Income and Wealth Inequality, Poverty and Food Insecurity; (2) Capitalism; (3) The Nature of Charity; and (4) Responses to the Polycrisis engaging and relevant, reporting discussion of these drawings reinforced their learning and were consistent with their own lived experiences. Several themes from the discussions emerged, such as Class Relations, Adverse Health Effects of Problematic Living and Working Conditions, the Nature of Charity and Barriers to Progress, which showed remarkable similarity with what is known about Grosz's motivations for these drawings. Regarding their potential for promoting health equity, students believed engaging with Grosz's drawings could provide means for mobilising healthcare and public health students and workers, as well as the public, to demand that governing authorities respond to these issues.

This is a craftivist (ie, craft-activist) methodological inquiry which uses zine-making to explore the experiences of a small group of National Health Service (NHS) foundation doctors in the south-west of England. Foundation doctors undertake a 2-year training programme, comprising rotating medical and surgical internships and advanced training, before receiving their full medical licence from the General Medical Council. Drawing on arts-based research (ABR) methodologies, the ethics of action research and a feminist new materialist ethico-onto-epistemology, this project is a collaborative inquiry that is attentive both to the need for praxis-oriented research with foundation doctors during the current NHS crisis and the role of method in producing particular forms of knowledge. Foundation doctors are reported to have high levels of burn-out and poor mental well-being, are facing increasing job insecurity with the rise of competition ratios for training posts, and in the past 2 years have initiated 14 strikes for better working conditions and pay. This project is the first example of craftivist ABR with foundation doctors and seeks to demonstrate the value of creativity as a form of praxis to communicate experiences differently and make a change.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming clinical practice while simultaneously raising concerns about trust. Drawing on complexity theory, this paper argues that the crisis of trust in medical AI is rooted in multiple forms of uncertainty, including non-causal statistical relations, system-level complexity and the irreducibility of clinical judgement. It introduces a 'U-map' (Uncertainty Map), a conceptual tool that links specific forms of uncertainty to role-appropriate clinical uses such as screening, triage or deliberation aid. Using this map, the paper calibrates model claims against distinct clinical epistemic roles and develops a multidimensional account of trust that spans technological reliability, institutional governance and cultural-emotional orientations. On this basis, the paper sketches a posthuman model of care in which human-machine collaboration and distributed accountability offer a more adequate response to the normative and epistemic challenges posed by medical AI.

Family members, relatives and friends are all affected when someone is hospitalised with a life-threatening illness. However, they often feel neglected and sometimes ignored by healthcare professionals. To address this, the reading of literature has been used in various clinical contexts in an attempt to humanise the care of patients and their relatives. Reading fiction enables healthcare professionals to imaginatively enter relatives' perspectives, fostering a deeper understanding of their experiences, which may in turn enhance family-centred care in clinical practice. However, research on how healthcare professionals engage with the reading of literary texts and what they discuss in such contexts has not yet been explored. This article presents findings from a qualitative study exploring a reading group for nurses at a hospital ward in Denmark, where literature on kinship was read and discussed. We examined the following specific research question: What takes place when nurses join a reading group in a clinical context to read and discuss literature on kinship?Based on a hermeneutical analysis of four audio-recorded reading group sessions, we identified the following three themes: (1) awareness of kinship and the negotiation of norms, (2) engagement with various perspectives and (3) acknowledgement of emotions when caring for family members. These themes are discussed in light of Felski's concept of recognition as knowing and acknowledgement. Additionally, by applying Meretoja's theory of narrative agency, we demonstrate how reading literature in a clinical setting can foster narrative agency, enabling nurses to expand and clarify their understandings and assumptions of kinship based on their ability to navigate and influence what Meretoja terms their 'narrative environment' in a clinical context.

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, composed around 1000 CE, contains a remarkable narrative of the birth of the Persian hero Rostam, which describes a procedure resembling a caesarean section, termed 'Rostam-zad' or 'Rostamina'. This account, predating Roman associations with the procedure, offers insights into ancient Persian medical practices, including surgical techniques, anaesthetic methods and postoperative care. The story details a lateral incision, the use of a cannabis and camphor concoction for pain management and suturing with a healing salve, culminating in maternal survival-a rare outcome in ancient surgical births. By analysing this narrative, this paper explores the intersection of myth and medicine, highlighting the sophistication of Persian medical knowledge and challenging Eurocentric narratives in the history of medicine. The Shahnameh's depiction not only reflects empirical surgical and pharmacological practices but also underscores the role of epic literature in preserving medical history, offering valuable perspectives on the cultural and scientific heritage of ancient Persia. This article also draws on contemporary scholarship, offering a comparative exploration of this cultural and medical tradition alongside Greco-Roman, Indian and Islamic medical texts. Additionally, the article clarifies that Ferdowsi's purpose in composing the Shahnameh was primarily to preserve the Persian language and mythohistorical identity, not to record medical procedures. The present study treats the narrative of Rostam's birth as a 'mytho-medical' episode, a symbolic story that nevertheless preserves empirical medical knowledge embedded in Persian cultural memory.