On 1 August, it was announced that the family of Henrietta Lacks reached a settlement with the biotech company over non-consensual use of her cells. Most of us know the story very well already; Lacks ...

In recent years, ‘vulnerability’ has been getting more traction in theoretical, professional and popular spaces as an alternative or complement to the concept of risk. As a group of science and ...

This article explores conceptual and methodological challenges surrounding the recovery of patients’ voices in the history of medicine. We examine the debate that followed Roy Porter’s seminal article ...

The French sculptor Camille Claudel at about the age of 40 developed a psychotic illness that proved to be chronic. Delusions of persecution, focused on her former mentor and lover Auguste Rodin, ...

Sometimes, perhaps more often than most of us like to admit, it can feel like we’re just pawns in some giant chess game. Too small and insignificant to influence the players, we worry instead about ...

This paper discusses various justifications for including medical humanities and art in healthcare education. It expresses concern about portrayals of the humanities and art as benign and servile in ...

The current, popular view of the novel Frankenstein is that it describes the horrors consequent upon scientific experimentation; the pursuit of science leading inevitably to tragedy. In reality the ...

This article puts critical disability studies and global health into conversation around the phenomenon of scarf injury in Bangladesh. Scarf injury occurs when a woman wearing a long, traditional ...

The focus of this paper is the discourse of the ‘endgame’ of disease elimination linked to the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The aim is to explore how policy promise is ...

The prevailing, clinical view of schizophrenia, as reflected in the psychiatric literature, suggests both that people with schizophrenia have lost their sense of self and that they have a diminished ...

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849) was a doctor and intermittently brilliant poet whose explorations of “the florid Gothic in poetry” (his words) offer some of the most haunting, claustrophobic, and ...

The destructive action of World War II extended far beyond the traditional battlefield arena, the more familiar trench-and-no-man’s-land zones that had typified World War I. This special issue ...