This ground-breaking book sets out a fresh vision for a future medical education by providing a radical reconceptualisation of the purposes of medical humanities through a lens of critical health psychology and liberatory pedagogy. The medical humanities are conceived as translational media through which reductive, instrumental biomedicine can be raised in quality, intensity, and complexity by embracing ethical, aesthetic, political, and transcendental values. This translation occurs throu...

Self-Literacy: Writing Out Personhood offers fifty perspectives on gaining an understanding of what ‘personhood’ may mean through various disciplines. Literature is a key medium through which selves are mapped as humans are written into being. Such literature is intimately tied to health such as within self-help literature, written accounts of illness, or of characters who are defined by their afflictions – physical, psychological, and moral. This book adopts an essay approach to ...

This book critically analyses how politics and power affect the ways that medicine is taught and learned. Challenging society’s historic reluctance to connect the realm of politics to the realm of medicine, Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice: The Contradiction Cure emphasizes the need for medical students to engage with social justice issues, including global health crises resulting from the climate emergency, and the health implications of widening social inequality.

While medical language is soaked in metaphor, and thinking with metaphor is central to diagnostic work, medicine – that is, medical culture, clinical practice and medical education – outwardly rejects metaphor for objective, literal scientific language. This thought-provoking book argues that this is a misstep, and critically considers what embracing the use of metaphors and similes might mean for shaping medical culture, and especially the doctor–patient relationship, in a healthy way.

The field of the medical humanities is developing rapidly, however, there has also been parallel concern from sceptics that the value of medical humanities educational interventions should be open to scrutiny and evidence. Just what is the impact of medical humanities provision upon the education of medical students? In an era of limited resources, is such provision worth the investment? This innovative text addresses these pressing questions, describes the contemporary territory comprisin...

How Do I Look? Educating Doctors’ Senses Through the Medical Humanities uses the medical diagnostic method to identify a chronic symptom in medical culture: the unintentional production of insensibility through compulsory mis-education. This book identifies the symptom and its origins and offers an intervention: deliberate and planned education of sensibility through the introduction of medical humanities to the core undergraduate medicine and surgery curriculum.To change medical c...

This book challenges functional models for more aesthetic and ethical models, where communication is grounded in values systems of cultures. Here, communication is treated as a distributed phenomenon involving networks of persons, activities and artifacts, and extends beyond doctor-patient relationships to working in and across teams around patients. The purpose of the book is to stimulate thinking about how patient care and safety may be improved through a focus upon the ‘non-technical’ w...

This persuasive volume develops a novel approach to medical education and the medical humanities, making a case for the integration of the two to explore the ways in which ‘warm’ humanism and ‘cold’ technologies can come together to design humane posthumanist futures in medicine.There are many problems with conventional medical education. It can be overly technocratic, dehumanizing, and empathy-eroding, introducing artefacts that lead to harm and reproduce inequality and injustice....

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice.In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. F...

This book explores previously unexamined overlaps between the poetic imagination and the medical mind. It shows how appreciation of poetry can help us to engage with medicine in more intense ways based on ‘de-familiarising’ old habits and bringing poetic forms of ‘close reading’ to the clinic.Bleakley and Neilson carry out an extensive critical examination of the well-established practices of narrative medicine to show that non-narrative, lyrical poetry does different kind of work,...

The ultimate enrichment and survival guide for Foundation Programme doctors, Staying Human During the Foundation Programme and Beyond provides time-tested advice and the latest information on every aspect of a junior doctor's life – from clinical transitions, to coping with stress, enhancing self-care and protecting personal and professional relationships. Already acknowledged in its original Canadian edition as an invaluable resource by thousands of doctors working across North A...

The purpose of medical education is to benefit patients by improving the work of doctors. Patient centeredness is a centuries old concept in medicine, but there is still a long way to go before medical education can truly be said to be patient centered. Ensuring the centrality of the patient is a particular challenge during medical education, when students are still forming an identity as trainee doctors, and conservative attitudes towards medicine and education are common amongst medical ...