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.
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
Amber Lascelles, Research Associate for the Black Health and the Humanities project, reflects on the motivations behind the project, the marginalisation of Black health research in the UK, and what the humanities have to
Lottie Hughes reflects on the public, the private – and Kim Kardashian – during the COVID-19 pandemic
Kate McAllister reflects on parallels between COVID-19 and the early twentieth century epidemic of Encephalitis Lethargica.
Kristin Hay discusses the moral panic around student populations after increased access to the contraceptive pill
Reading Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s novel Blu’s Hanging during lockdown, Julia Brown considers the significance of silence during a pandemic.
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
What do objects from a bygone age tell us about epidemics today? Since opening in June, the exhibition Contagious! reflects on the history of pandemics, including patients’ painful experiences, coping and containment strategies, and examples of ground-breaking medical research. Ruben Verwaal reports on his recent visit.
Laura Donald reflects on invisible health conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. I live in a Glasgow tenement building whose inhabitants pride themselves on their neighbourliness. Often I mute the residents’ WhatsApp group, sometimes for
