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 around self-harm. Sarah Naomi Shaw’s 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 treatment of madness through numerous examples […]
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 talk about…death. In death and dying […]
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, a relational movement in Western healthcare, […]
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 attention to a ‘patient-shaped’ gap in […]
