Consent is the golden principle that determines the legality of most medical treatment. However, whilst choice is the much-vaunted central tenet of maternity care, its importance emphasised in policy documents, the lived experience is often… Read More »Narratives of consent and invisible women: Part 1
Consent is the golden principle that determines the legality of most medical treatment. However, whilst choice is the much-vaunted central tenet of maternity care, its importance emphasised in policy documents, the lived experience is often… Read More »Narratives of consent and invisible women: Part 2
Click here to join the webinar on Zoom Menstruation is an everyday experience for half the human population, essential for the species’ survival and a crucial marker of gender difference in many cultures. Yet it… Read More »Invisible Blood: Hiding Menstruation from the Middle Ages to Today
This 90-minute panel considers how archival collections highlight or hide understudied aspects of women’s identities within medical contexts. Taking an intersectional approach, it looks towards themes of class, disability, gender identity and feminism to reflect… Read More »(In)visible Identities? Medical Humanities, Women and the Archive
In looking at “The Autobiography of Margery Kempe” and Jane Austen’s “Emma” and “Mansfield Park”, one is afforded a close look at the invisible burdens faced by the female body. Objectified, abused, conquered, molded, and… Read More »Policing the Female Body: Invisible Burdens in the Medical Humanities
Since pathography has become an established form of life writing, criticism has started to question which patterns, plots and authorial postures are the most suitable for telling the illness experience. While giving meaning to traumatic… Read More »Missing pieces: questioning absences and omissions in pathography
Phenomenological studies of illness expression in medical humanities and qualitative health research tend to foreground the illness-event as the necessary and sufficient cause for writing about illness. In this paper, I argue instead that the… Read More »Being unable to think: therapeutic reflections on our non-future
How can the medical humanities be harnessed to capture and convey the narratives of older (50+) LGBT+ adults in the UK, many of whom will have endured extraordinary discrimination and homophobia/transphobia during their life course,… Read More »Silent voices, hidden lives: carving out narrative space for LGBT+ elders in the medical curriculum
As we live through the Covid-19 pandemic, our sense of space is changing. ‘Lock-down’ and ‘self-isolation’ have become commonplace phrases, living spaces have become workspace. The Pandemic has revealed the role of space in transforming… Read More »Always already entangled: Creative health, sustainability and theatres of medicine
This paper describes how an arts-based, thematic approach to spiritual care can be used to engage with aspects of cancer patients’ experiences that remain largely “invisible” in contemporary healthcare practices. Whilst modern medicine has been… Read More »From Beaune to Breaking Bad: Rethinking the spiritual care of cancer patients