‘Obstinate Material’: Surgical intervention and Obsessional Thoughts
Eva Surawy Stepney reflects on the use of psychosurgery for the treatment of obsessional thoughts.
The Cultural Cauldron
Daniel Martini gives an insight into the undergraduate Medical Humanities programme at UC Santa Barbara.
Making Space for the Patient’s Voice: notes from a creative writing workshop (part 2)
Gillian Shirreffs writes: In early November 2020, Jane Hartshorn and I hosted a workshop as part of the Thinking Through Things: Object Encounters in the Medical Humanities project.
Making Space for the Patient’s Voice: notes from a creative writing workshop (part 1)
Jane Hartshorn writes: In November 2020, I facilitated a creative writing workshop as part of Thinking Through Things: Object Encounters in the Medical Humanities.
Race, Public Health, and Drug Control in the American Philippines
Eva Ward discusses the contradictions and assumptions behind America’s ‘war on drugs’ in the Philippines.
The Emotional Epidemiology of Music Analysis
Epidemiology is a hot topic in the COVID-19 era. Institutions like the World Health Organization, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the loci of epidemiological
Following Breathing
Artist Lucy Sabin reflects on making art about breath in 2020. Breathworks began as a participatory arts project on social media, expanding to become an exhibit and events programme supported by Art Fund and
Masks and Monsters: 2020 in Review
What a year. In early 2020 the world went into a lockdown from which it has yet to fully emerge; The Polyphony was at the forefront of the medical humanities’ response to the coronavirus crisis as it unfolded, and unsurprisingly, our top five most-read posts of this year directly addressed the pandemic.
Shouting Above the Noise: Autistic Life Writing and the Interdisciplinary Autism Research Festival
In this post, Anna Stenning demonstrates how life writing by autistic authors contributes to medical and cultural framings of autism. She also introduces the Interdisciplinary Autism Research Festival, which will take place in May 2021.
Postapocalyptic Peoples? Covid-19, Public Health, and Native Americans
In this post, Anna Kemball reflects on the framing of Native Americans as ‘postapocalyptic’ people in the context of Coronavirus. She discusses the missing public health data on Native American rates of Covid-19 amidst