During nonemergency appointments at traditional sites of āyurvedic healthcare in Kerala, South India, classically trained Brāhmaṇa physicians and their patients seldom exchange anything of substance (whether medicinal or monetary). The physician-patient interface instead routinely involves an exchange of knowledge. Interactions between phy…[Read more]

As the Indian population’s interest in biomedicine increased at the end of the nineteenth century, public confidence in India’s indigenous medicines flagged. Physicians of Ayurveda and officials of Indian medical organizations responded with discussions about and plans for reconfiguring the āyurveda (“life science”) of the Sanskrit medical…[Read more]

For at least the last twenty years, scholarly attention has been drawn to the numerous depictions of cancer in comic books as well as oncology’s use of the comics medium (Rhode and Connor, 2012). However, little in the way of comprehensive analysis has been attempted, especially in terms of the various genres addressed. In this presentation, a ca…[Read more]

In the medical humanities, there has been a growing interest in diagnosing disease in fictional characters, particularly with the idea that characters in Charles Dickens’s novels may be suffering from diseases recognised today. However, an area that deserves greater attention is the representation of women’s ageing as disease in Victorian lit…[Read more]

The objects of science education are transformed, degraded and disappeared for many reasons, and sometimes take other things with them when they go. This close reading of an undergraduate physiology laboratory report demonstrates how the kymograph was never a stand-alone instrument, but intertwined with conceptual frameworks and technical skills,…[Read more]

A brief piece on what I call “diagnosis deafness.” In short, to depict the sudden disorientation and shock of being diagnosed with cancer, comics artists frequently employ a visual rhetoric usually reserved for instances of deafness. At least momentarily – during an immensely significant moment in the life of the character – words fail, dev…[Read more]

Shipibo indigenous people perform a sophisticated array of vocal musical genres, including short ‘laughing songs’ called osanti. These song-jokes make fun of certain non-humans, mostly animals. They are by definition sung from within the non-humans’ perspective. Osanti are only performed by trained specialists in indigenous medicine and sorce…[Read more]

This paper draws on chinese folklore, chinese medical theory, chinese materia medica and western ethnobotany and comparative religion to construct a theory of how the common infestation of ganoderma lucidum on peach trees in China would have led to an association of peach trees with immortality, daoist alchemy and the ability to vanquish ghosts…[Read more]

German version of Parables of Care (2017). Translated into German by Dr Andrea Hacker. Parables of Care presents true stories of creative responses to dementia care, told by carers, taken from a group of over 100 case studies available at http://carenshare.city.ac.uk/.

Creativity, emotional intelligence and common sense are amply shown in these…[Read more]

“Women Medical Writers/Writing Women’s Medicine” as English 160 (Introduction to Studies in Women’s Writing) at Illinois State University, Fall 2018.

At the intersection of comics and medicine is the rise of the Graphic Medicine scholarship field. This course examines the ways in which the sequentialized hybrid of word and image is bringing new insights to patient, healthcare, and clinical experiences.

In any manner of ways, the comics medium (whether known as comic books, graphic novels,…[Read more]

Preface to Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018)

In response to the four commentaries on ‘Cyborg uterine geography’, in which I argued normatively for reorganizing gestation on the basis of comradeliness, I grapple with three overlapping conceptual areas highlighted: the ethical and political affordances of the term ‘generosity’ in relation to care and pregnancy; the methodological questio…[Read more]

There is increasing evidence that practitioners’ relational skills, such as empathy and reflection, improve patients’ health outcomes. Efforts to shift education toward patient-centered care in interprofessional teams have been made at the professional level, most notably in medical schools. However, reform must begin at the preprofessional lev…[Read more]

Crip technoscience

Shortly after the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, mayors of global cities committed to addressing climate change via urban-scale projects aimed at promoting liveable, sustainable, and healthy communities. While such projects are taken for granted as serving the common good, this paper addresses the…[Read more]

Shortly after the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, mayors of global cities committed to addressing climate change via urban-scale projects aimed at promoting liveable, sustainable, and healthy communities. While such projects are taken for granted as serving the common good, this paper addresses the…[Read more]

New digital projects use geographic information systems (GIS) and crowdsourcing applications to gather data about the accessibility of public spaces for disabled people. While these projects offer useful tools, their approach to technology and disability is often depoliticized. Compliance-based maps take disability for granted as medical…[Read more]

An overview of proposed categories for the growing graphic medicine genre of cancer comics (i.e. cancer narratives in comic book form) and an initial theory on the significant linkage between this illness and particular medium.