‘Performance, Medicine and the Human’: Book Review
Maria Patsou reviews Performance, Medicine and the Human (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2020) by Alex Mermikides.
‘Biofictions’: Book Review
Can the study of human genetics authoritatively address the subject of race? James Hearing reviews Josie Gill’s new book Biofictions, which won the 2020 British Society for Literature and Science book prize.
Science Fiction and Psychology: Book Review
Beata Gubacsi reviews Gavin Miller’s Science Fiction and Psychology (Liverpool University Press, 2020). Gavin Miller and Anna McFarlane, introducing the BMJ’s Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities special issue as part of the 2016
‘Archiving an Epidemic’: Book Review
Louisa Hann reviews Robb Hernández’s Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Avant-Garde (New York: New York University Press, 2019). The broad and ever-expanding domain of HIV/AIDS arts and performance scholarship has faced
‘Entangled Bodies: Art, Identity and Intercorporeality’: Book Review
Joshua Shaw reviews Entangled Bodies: Art, Identity and Intercorporeality, ed. Tammer El-Sheikh (Malaga: Vernon Press, 2020).
‘How much philosophical hay can be made with an empirical scythe?’ A review of Ruth Leys’ The Ascent of Affect
How should thinkers across the disciplines conceptualise emotional life? What role do theories and histories of affect play in how we conceptualise cultural analysis, or in how we think about aesthetics? Birgit Breidenbach reviews Ruth
Wendy Lowe reviews ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Shame: Methods, Theory, Norms, Cultures and Politics’
Wendy Lowe takes a look at a new edited collection on shame, and explores its relevance to the medical humanities. In some ways, because Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Shame deals with a cultural tendency to
Review of Moments of Rupture: The importance of affect in medical education and surgical training
How can trainee health professionals learn from the ‘messy reality of actual clinical practice’? Wendy Lowe reviews a new book exploring what learning is, or should be, in medical education. Moments of Rupture combines
Intellectual Disability: A Conceptual History 1200-1900
How does the language we use shape how we think about disability? In Deborah Thorpe’s review of Intellectual Disability: A Conceptual History, 1200-1900 (2018), the history of intellectual disability emerges as one of contested terms.
Compassionomics
A powerful call-to-action limited by its inability to adequately define ‘compassion’: Lara Ronan, MD, reviews “Compassiononomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring makes a Difference” by Stephen Trezaciak and Anthony Mazzerelli (2019).