There is now a context for teaching humanities in undergraduate medical education via special study modules (SSMs). This paper discusses the instrumental and non-instrumental role of the humanities in ...

Despite shame being recognised as a powerful force in the clinical encounter, it is underacknowledged, under-researched and undertheorised in the contexts of health and medicine. In this paper we make ...

Essayist Susan Sontag alerted us more than 20 years ago to the way in which clusters of metaphors attach themselves to our discussion of certain diseases, and the influence these metaphors exert on ...

This article aims to engender discussion about the nature and future of medical humanities. First, a normative personal vision of medical humanities as an inclusive movement is outlined. Some of the ...

Core symptoms of PTSD across four millennia: a phenomenological and nosographic analysis – from ancient Mesopotamian texts to modern psychiatric classifications ...

Yarwar (2008) wrote in the Lancet that ‘Doctors are trained in analgesia, but not in meaning’. Attunement to the meaning of a patient's experience can improve doctor-patient communication and have ...

The inclusion of medical humanities with medical curricula is a question that has been the focus of attention for many within the evolving field. This study addressed the question from a medical ...

1 Department of Medical Microbiology and Infection Control, Jeroen Bosch Hospital, 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands 2 Department of Medical Humanities (Metamedica), VU University Medical Centre, ...

This article reconstructs the historical development and evolving conceptual architecture of the medical humanities since its emergence as a university subject in the 1960s. Originating in late 1960s ...

This article compares William Carlos Williams’s short story ‘The Use of Force’ (1938) and Tess Gerritsen’s novel The Surgeon (2001) to explore how biomedical care can slide into coercion and how ...

In this epistolary paper, we draw on the work of an interdisciplinary, psychosocial study of the relationship between time and care, Waiting Times , to explore the significance of a book of letters as ...

Autistic life writing refers to first-hand accounts of autistic lived experiences which challenge dominant deficit-based understandings of autism. Within autistic life writing, texts that directly ...