Sick: A Memoir
What hope is there for healing when the medical establishment views not your symptoms, but you yourself as the problem? Christy Zink reviews Sick: A Memoir (2018), Porochista Khakpour’s uncompromising account of her struggle
Chronicity and Crisis
Alex Morden Osborne reflects on Chronicity and Crisis: Time in the Medical Humanities, a collaborative conference held jointly by Montclair State University’s Medical Humanities Program and the Waiting Times project, held at Montclair State, October 25-26, 2019.
Anne Boyer’s “The Undying” (3/3)
The Polyphony invited Agnes Arnold-Forster and Will Viney to review Anne Boyer’s cancer memoir, The Undying (2019), and to respond to each other’s reviews. Their reviews were published earlier this week; their responses to each other are below.
Refusing Resolution: Narratives of Self-harm
Veronica Heney proposes a new methodology for understanding narratives of self-harm The assumption that self-harm is unnatural, that it is inevitably incomprehensible to the ‘normal’ person, permeates the clinical, sociological, and even fictional literature
‘Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness’: Book Review
Wendy Lowe reviews Anna Harpin’s Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness (Routledge, 2018). Madness, Art and Society provides a comprehensive account of Anna Harpin’s ways of looking at and critiquing the practices of diagnosis and
Fragments and Silences: Rethinking Narrative in End-of-Life Care
Joe Wood considers the role – and limitations – of narrative in end-of-life care by way of hospice pioneer, Cicely Saunders. Death is taboo. We live in a death-denying society. You can’t just
Languages of Care in Narrative Medicine (Review)
In this post, Autumn Marie Chilcote reviews Languages of Care in Narrative Medicine: Words, Space and Time in the Healthcare Ecosystem (New York: Springer International, 2018), authored by Maria Giulia Marini. Narrative Medicine,
Fact, Fiction and Phenomenology
Novelist Hilda Reilly discusses biographical fiction as a research method into the patient experience — and the unexpected questions raised in her exploration of Bertha Pappenheim, aka ‘Anna O’. Medical historian Roy Porter (1985) draws