Stephen Pattison outlines his vision for medical humanities and then offers cautionary notes on what might go wrong with the movement. These notes are based on what he holds has already gone wrong ...

Social prescription (SP) entails a model of care where healthcare professionals can help address the social determinants of health by prescribing non-medical activities such as time in community ...

The Visual Medical Humanities are both old and new. For centuries, artists and anatomists have collaborated in their explorations into the workings of the human body. More recently, there have been ...

This May, the World Health Assembly (WHA) will vote on re-establishing a mandate for the WHO to address the health consequences of nuclear weapons and war.1 Health professionals and their associations ...

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 ...

Penicillin is often considered one of the greatest discoveries of 20th century medicine. However, the revolution in therapeutics brought about by sulphonamides also had a profound effect on British ...

Among the growing number of works of graphic fiction, a number of titles dealing directly with the patient experience of illness or caring for others with an illness are to be found. Thanks in part to ...

There is increasing evidence for the efficacy of non-medical strategies to improve mental health and well-being. Get into Reading is a shared reading intervention which has demonstrable acceptability ...

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 ...

The papers in this issue by Wall and Howath and colleagues provide a much-needed focus on the ways in which images of genitalia carry implicit messages about what is normative and thus acceptable (see ...

Informed by the work of Michel Foucault, the authors discuss the Nip/Tuck episode entitled “Momma Boone” and how it discursively constructs “obesity”. They show how this popular media text can be ...

Objectives To review the extant literature on HIV criminal laws, and to determine the impact of these laws on public health practice. Methods The available research on this topic was obtained and ...