Mapping the Medical Legacies of British Colonialism

Reflecting on her recent fellowship at Art HX, researcher Shelley Angelie Saggar traces how objects and photographs recall the medical legacies of British colonialism, as well as her own family history.  

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Nature’s Medicine: Could Green Prescribing Shape the Future of our Health?

Shauna Walker contextualises the UK government's recent investment in 'green social prescribing.'

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From Menstruation to the Menopause: Book Review

Jemma Walton reviews From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French, by Maria Kathryn Tomlinson (Liverpool University Press, 2021).

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Sensitive Subjects Pt. 2: Creative Practice and Ethics in Times of Loss

Olivia Turner reflects on the Sensitive Subjects: Creative Practice and Ethics workshop she organised at Newcastle University, turning to issues around bereavement and grief.

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Recent Posts

A photograph of Cumberland Lodge, a large stately home under a bright blue sky

Power Struggle and Critical Encounter: The Birth of Arts in Health and the Medical Humanities

Frances Williams leans into the tensions of narrating the history of the Arts in Health movement, a sprawling field encompassing many 'sub-fields', including the medical humanities.

Yard sign with text: You Are Worthy of Love

Reclaiming the Disabled Sexual Self

Arlene Jackson reflects on sexuality, empowerment and discrimination in Samantha Renke’s 2022 memoir ‘You are the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread’. Amongst the many themes in Samantha Renke’s memoir, You Are the Best Thing Since

A critical posthuman call to make ‘person-centered care’ messier

Jamie Smith, a practicing nurse, brings a critical posthuman approach to ‘person-centre care’- urging us to question the assumptions that underly the widely employed framework.  As a nurse, privilege is made perceptible to me

A bookcase with dramatic sunlight cast from the left

Writing elites and old boys networks in the medical humanities

Eleanor Shaw analyses the role of privilege, gender, racism, and sexism in the making of academic journals in the medical humanities. In the past few years, the critical turn in the medical humanities has

co-sleeping in the tsunami shelter

Embodied Vulnerability: Securing Sleep at Japanese Tsunami Shelters

Brigitte Steger explores how an earthquake and tsunami disaster threatens sleep in many ways and what we can learn about sleep health by paying attention to extreme situations. 

Psychotechne: Assessment, Testing and Categorisation

Sasha Bergstrom-Katz and Tomas Percival discuss their ongoing exhibition at Birkbeck, University of London.  Psychotechne: Assessment, Testing and Categorisation, an exhibition curated by historian Sarah Marks, is currently on view at the Peltz Gallery

White background with large black bubble writing saying: Disability Matters

Disability Matters: Thinking critically about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) has become a widespread feature of contemporary discourse. With this in mind, Professor Dan Goodley and Dr Kirsty Liddiard discuss the need to remain critical. As members of iHuman

Writing my way out: A Poetics of Illness and Disability

Reflecting on their pandemic life living in communal halls as a PhD student at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Cat Chong considers their practices involved in continually negotiating a chronic illness within the context of Singapore’s circuit breaker measures.

Water drop on an open book

On difficult patients and informal complaints

Thinking critically about the role of complaint in patient care, Jelmer Brüggemann, Lisa Guntram and Ann-Charlotte Nedlund explore the ’difficult patient’ as a medical humanities concept. Possibility comes from intimacy with what has thickened