Medical Humanities - Corpus

Navigating the entangled and “infuriatingly intricate” world

11 September 2017 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Consider the term ‘medical science’. Easy. For most of us it conjures laboratories, test-tubes, scientists in white coats, evidence-based research, miracle medical breakthroughs. Medical science trips off the tongue so naturally – it’s surely one word, not two. The bond between ‘medical’ and ‘science’ is super-glued. It’s solid and unbreakable. We’ve closed the gap between these words, left no cracks to fall through. Medical science: a term to lean on, a term to trust.

Now consider the term ‘medical humanities’. Not so easy. Or so I surmise from the confused look on people’s faces when I tell them that the medical humanities are my field of research. It’s as if the words ‘medical’ and ‘humanities’ are unrelated strangers who need to be coaxed from separate, distant rooms and forced together for an awkward conversation where neither can quite understand the other’s language or point of view. What on earth would they talk about? What would be the point? What’s the use of the medical humanities? Where’s the miracle medical breakthrough in that research?

“Start at once a bedside library”: narrative competence and medicine

4 September 2017 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Canadian physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919), sometimes called ‘the father of modern medicine’, urged doctors to maintain a lifetime habit of reading. In an address delivered at the opening of the Boston Medical Library in 1901, he said:

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.”

But, important though it was to keep up-to-date with the latest scientific findings, he did not want clinicians to limit themselves to reading medical texts. Osler advocated also reading broadly and deeply in the humanities and literature. He believed that “for physicians to be properly educated to practice their art, knowledge of the science of medicine … must be supplemented by familiarity with the humanities.”

A review of Havi Carel’s ‘Phenomenology of Illness’.

7 August 2017 Leave a Comment

Katherine Hall

Vita Non Est Vivere, Sed Valere Vita Est: life is not just being alive, but being well — Martial.

How appropriate Martial’s words are for Phenomenology of Illness by Havi Carel, which explores the concepts of illness and a life well lived. Although overtly a call to arms for philosophers to take more seriously the experience of illness and what this means to be human and for humans, the superb clarity of language makes this an accessible book for anyone interested in this field. It is a text which can speak poignantly to patients, those who care for them, and anybody with an interest in the philosophy of medicine.

It is to the teachers of student doctors, nurses and other future healthcare workers that I particularly address this review. Havi Carel’s book lays bare the injuries endured by patients due to the limitations of the biomedical model of discourse – but thankfully illustrates many possible ways forward.

‘Listening with my heart’: Poems by Aotearoa New Zealand nurses

24 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Miriam Vollweiler

By their involvement in the arts, whether poetry, painting, or writing novels, nurses and other health professionals have the opportunity to express a side of themselves which is not always possible in their day-to-day work. It is a creative way of reflecting and thinking about what they see and do and feel in their daily contact with patients.” – Lorraine Ritchie, editor of Listening with my Heart

The recently-launched book, Listening with my heart: Poems by Aotearoa New Zealand nurses, is the first anthology of poems by nurses to be published in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Edited by nurse and poet Lorraine Ritchie, with illustrations by Janet de Wagt, it contains poems selected from work submitted by nurses as part of a New Zealand Nurses Organisation’s ‘Visibility of Nursing’ project.

Medicine and poetry: the how, the why, and things of wonder

3 July 2017 2 Comments

Christina Grove

So we have come to the end of the first University Semester for 2017. For a third year medical student this means a welcome break from lectures, tests and cold flats. But this semester wasn’t only filled with facts to be learned and diseases to be understood.

In the first semester each third year med student chooses a Humanities selective. For six weeks we put down Robins Basic Pathology and pick up philosophy, the Book of Job or, in my case, a selection of poetry. The Poetry selective was taken by Dr Tom McLean from the Department of English and Linguistics, who helped us to analyse various forms of poetry, starting with sonnets and ending in a visit from “real life poet” Lynley Edmeades.

Risk watch/wrist watch

12 June 2017 1 Comment

Koenraad Kuiper

Poems are sneaky but each poem is sneaky in its own way. We could say the same about melanomas. And so, sneakily, just like that, a little volcano on the left arm turns wrist watch into risk watch…