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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Numerous medical schools have been updating and modernising their undergraduate curricula in response to the changing health needs of today’s society and the updated General Medical Council ...

This essay explores the contradictory, prejudicial attitudes towards circumcision and Jewish male sexuality circulating in eighteenth-century English print culture. I argue that while Jewish men had ...

Contemporary medicine distinguishes between illness and disease. Illness refers to a person’s subjective experience of symptoms; disease refers to objective bodily pathology. For many illnesses, ...