This paper thinks about the experience of geriatric frailty and the ways in which it can elude critical and conceptual frameworks in medical humanities — and medicine itself. Frailty is characterized by an uncertain future… Read More »Between Chronicity and Crisis: The Elusive Time of Frailty
As a range of complex conditions, and being inextricably linked with social anxieties, dementia is a very ‘slippery’ concept to define (Zeilig, 2014: 260). How then, do we communicate it, both verbally and visually? Previous… Read More »Seasonal changes: Visualising the progression of dementia.
Dementia is a collective name for progressive degenerative brain syndromes which, while not impairing consciousness, affect memory, orientation, perception, comprehension and communication. The condition knows no social, economic, ethnic, gendered or geographical boundaries, and is… Read More »Picturing a cloud of unknowing: photography, lostness, and cognitive decline
Florian Zeller’s play The Father (Le Père) depicts the struggles of a dementia ridden mind constantly battling with its own version of temporality and spatiality. Through a strategic structuring of time lapses, interchangeable characters and… Read More »Witnessing the Invisible: Representation and Patient-hood in ‘The Father’
Population-based opportunistic screening for cognitive impairment takes place at a hospital in Sweden. According to the local policy, all patients over the age of 65 who are admitted to the geriatric ward, and who have… Read More »Ethico-Political Aspects of Opportunistic Screening: Clinical Judgment at a Geriatric Ward in Sweden
The British ‘care home’, as it is understood today, is a relatively modern concept rooted in specific shifts in mid-century policy. Post-1945, the welfare state offered new spaces to care for the elderly, moving from… Read More »Hidden Spaces of Care in Post-War British Fiction by Muriel Spark and B. S. Johnson