Medical education increasingly acknowledges the importance of teaching structural inequality, colonial histories, social determinants of health, and health inequities. Yet students often encounter a persistent tension between critical reflection and clinical action, asking how such knowledge translates into the practical work of becoming a physician. This article argues that questioning how medical knowledge is produced, authorized, and institutionalized constitutes a form of professional action rather than a departure from it. Drawing on my teaching of the Social and Community Health course within a required pre-clinical medical curriculum, I propose the concept of epistemic intervention as a pedagogical approach that encourages students to examine how evidence, expertise, diagnosis, and clinical authority are historically and politically constituted. Rather than advocating a new canon for medical education, I use Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome as pedagogical exemplars of a broader educational strategy. Read together, these texts illuminate complementary dimensions of medical knowledge: the institutional production of clinical authority and the persistence of alternative forms of knowing that remain partially invisible to dominant biomedical frameworks. Through patient stories, reflective discussion, and applied bioethical analysis, such interventions can help students cultivate reflexive clinical judgment, epistemic humility, and resistance to premature diagnostic closure. In an era characterized by algorithmic medicine, persistent health inequities, and contested expertise, the article argues that future physicians require not only technical competence but also the capacity to critically evaluate how medicine comes to know what it knows.
This paper investigates why the United States fully securitized acute Covid-19 but not Long Covid, despite the latter's potentially greater long-term socioeconomic burden. Drawing on securitization theory, riskification, and scholarship on slow-onset and delayed-onset threats, it develops a four-part theoretical framework to explain structural variation in security responses: (1) actor framing and audience uptake; (2) the spatiotemporal visibility of harm; (3) a systemic 'body count bias' that privileges mortality over morbidity; and (4) domestic and international disincentives that suppress sustained attention to chronic, ambiguous crises. Using a most-similar systems design, the study compares U.S. governmental discourse, policy actions, and media framings of acute Covid-19-marked by temporal compression, spectacular mortality, and rapid elite mobilization-with the diffuse, bottom-up emergence of Long Covid, characterized by invisible, dispersed, and medically uncertain disability. The analysis shows that Long Covid's slow-creeping trajectory, lack of spectacle, and association with stigmatized or marginalized populations prevent it from being framed as an existential threat to a clearly identifiable referent object, relegating it instead to technocratic risk management. The study concludes that the U.S. security apparatus is structurally ill-equipped to recognize and respond to slow-onset, disabling threats, leaving the country vulnerable not only to Long Covid's long-term societal effects but to future mass-disabling events-natural or engineered-that erode state capacity gradually rather than through acute, lethal shock.
Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED)'s annual poetry competition was named for and envisioned in the spirit of the iconic American poet and pioneering patient-centered physician William Carlos Williams. It honors his legacy by celebrating contemporary clinician writers-both medical students and established practitioners-whose work illustrates the art of medicine and the dynamic interplay of health care and the humanities. An influential poet in the imagist movement in modernist art and literature, Williams' poetry is appreciated for its stark minimalism and vivid attention to the details of early twentieth-century life, particularly in the working-class neighborhoods outside of New York City where he practiced medicine. While Williams at times struggled to balance his desire to write with the demands of his medical practice, his medical career afforded him the financial freedom to write, as well as the inspiration for poems jotted down on prescription blanks in the breaks between patient visits. Each of the past 44 years, NEOMED has recognized exceptional medical student poetry by awarding first-, second-, and third-place prizes, as well as honorable mentions, to students enrolled in a medical degree program in the US, Puerto Rico, or Canada. Having begun under the leadership of Drs. Delese Wear and Martin Kohn in 1982, NEOMED's William Carlos Williams poetry competition is the oldest running poetry competition for medical students in the United States. The competition introduced a new category for physician poets in 2025, welcoming submissions from any rank of physician (MD or DO) at any career stage, from residency to retirement, in North America.
This paper draws from a framework of virtue ethics and narrative medicine to present a content analysis and teaching resource of virtue-illustrating stories found in medical journals. As acquired dispositions, virtues are cultivated not merely by listening to lectures but through reflection, experience, role-modeling, practice, and internalization. One way to encourage such cultivation is to use narratives to illustrate moral virtues in action. With this in mind, we identified a literature-based taxonomy of 12 core virtues in medicine, selected a sample of 180 narratives published in medical journals to perform a content analysis and frequency calculation of core virtues they illustrate, and identified a collection of 24 of these narratives to illustrate the 12 core virtues. In decreasing order of frequency, the 12 core virtues found in these narratives were benevolence, humility, practical wisdom, courage, respectfulness, trustworthiness, altruism, cooperativeness, temperance, honesty, integrity, and justice. The taxonomy and bibliographic resource we offer can help medical educators utilize medical narratives to reflect on and discuss core moral virtues in medicine, and the 24 virtue-illustrating narratives are short, accessible, and practical for time-constrained teachers and learners interested in the way stories manifest virtues in medicine. This taxonomical framework and narrative collection can help shine practical light on ethical challenges in medicine-which so often are complex, multilayered, uncertain, and fluid-and on the virtues that enable physicians and other healthcare professionals to respond well to those challenges.
Drawing upon firsthand accounts of GLP-1RA weight-loss drugs, this paper challenges the bioconservative view that effort is essential to self-control and the narrower view that obesity is simply a matter of weakness of will. Many dieters have persistent intrusive food thoughts that are neither transparent nor voluntarily controllable. By quieting food noise, these drugs offer users epistemic access to the true target of effective self-control and provide a pathway to long-term success that effort alone rarely secures. We argue that the value of self-control lies not in the subjective experience of struggle but in the skillful alignment of behavior with one's goals. "Effortless" self-control, far from being a cheat, can exemplify precisely what is valuable about agency.
This article reads Phillip McMahon’s Once Before I Go (2021) as a major intervention into Irish HIV/AIDS theatre and queer medical humanities. It examines how McMahon’s play stages the Irish past through criminalization, Catholic moral regulation, public health silence, homonormative respectability, and displacement as the social, medical, and affective conditions that made Ireland difficult or uninhabitable for some queer and HIV-affected subjects. Taking Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer use as its central theoretical lens, the article argues that Once Before I Go recovers the potential of histories, bodies, and forms of grief that Irish public culture had often left behind while it also refuses the Irish theatrical pattern in which AIDS death functions as punishment for queer excess or non-assimilation. Instead, through its nonlinear dramaturgy and memory, the play transforms AIDS grief into a resource for recognition, care, and survival. Bernard’s sick body is not staged as waste or warning, but as a site of dignity, agency, and political claim-making. Daithí’s survival exposes the limits of post-AIDS homonormativity and Jase’s presence reframes AIDS memory through contemporary struggles over bodily autonomy and recognition. Finally, the article claims that McMahon’s theatre makes the Irish past usable not by resolving it, but by keeping its unfinished demands in motion.
While health humanities baccalaureate and graduate programs have been increasing in recent years, little is known about the further education and career paths of program graduates or how a health humanities education may equip them for future endeavors. This information is key to supporting continued programmatic growth in health humanities. This study presents the results of a health humanities alumni survey developed by a research group within the Health Humanities Consortium’s Curriculum and Assessment Committee (CAC). This study seeks to answer two research aims: (1) what value do graduates of health humanities programs find in their learning for their careers and personal lives and (2) do the knowledge, skills, and values that alumni attribute to their health humanities education align with the five overarching themes (i.e., Interdisciplinarity, Internal Inquiry, External Examination, Praxis, and Transformative Education) that health humanities educators identified as desirable in a high-quality health humanities program as discovered in a North American focus group study (Klugman et al. 2026). The survey asked graduates of health humanities educational programs in the baccalaureate, graduate, and health professions levels about their post-health humanities education and employment paths and perceptions of the value and impact of their health humanities education. The 228 North American alumni-respondents were graduates of health humanities majors, minors, certificates, masters, doctorates, fellowships, pathways, and concentrations in health professions training programs. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of self-responses illustrate how health humanities educational programs contribute to students’ personal growth and professional success. Nearly two-thirds of health humanities graduates self-report working in health care. Respondents reported that a health humanities degree made them strong applicants for further education and was relevant to their jobs. Further, alumni’s self-reported educational gains generally align with the five themes emerging from educator focus groups. This survey demonstrates that graduates of health humanities programs find value from their health humanities education that aligns with the knowledge, skills, and values health humanities educators aim to impart.
This article draws on our doctoral research to explore ideas of structural mirroring between queer and chronically ill lifecourses, examining how our 'queer' bodies challenge normative constructions of time, future, and family. Grounded in scholarship on queer and crip temporalities, and informed by our own insider perspectives, we use our lived experience to show how such bodies might deviate from societal norms and temporal regulations around productivity, reproduction, and maturity. Building on traditions that extend 'queerness' beyond sexual identity, we position it as a critical lens for interrogating normative social structures. By reclaiming queerness as 'crookedness', we use auto/biographical narratives to illustrate how embodied experiences challenge reproductive futures and societal expectations. Focusing on temporal disruptions-such as recognition and visibility (diagnosis and coming out), maturity (leaving home and potential of marriage), and the future (e.g. reproduction)-we trace how 'crooked lifecourses' diverge from normative timelines. By placing the experiences of a woman in her twenties with chronic illnesses alongside those of a gay man in his thirties navigating Confucianist reproductive expectations, we highlight the exclusionary effects of chrononormativity. Our 'crooked lifecourse' concept aims to expand 'queer' and 'crip' as frameworks for understanding lives beyond normative expectations, while demonstrating how deviations from dominant temporalities generate alternative forms of care, intimacy, and resistance.
This article offers a metatheoretical analysis of contemporary research on sexology from and beyond the late nineteenth century. We draw attention to the use of (pseudo)medical photography in this scholarship and the diverse methods developed by researchers to engage with this sensitive material—from the black bar, to description in lieu of reproduction, to affective speculation. Our article equips queer medical humanities researchers with a critical account of the modes of ‘looking’ we employ in our study of queer history. We demonstrate how the sexological visual archive has become increasingly central to queer medical humanities scholarship that interrogates the medical violences at the heart of queer histories. Our article dwells not on this photographic archive but, rather, on a meta-archive of contemporary critical methods of looking at, examining, and showing these photographs. Through this meta-archive, we ask: How is the fraught nature of sexological photographs registered, ignored, or challenged by researchers, be it in terms of their often disturbing content or the sometimes hostile conditions of their production? How do we ‘look’ at and ‘show’ these photographs ethically—or can we? What risks (to the historical patient, to the photograph, and to each other) are being negotiated in these encounters? Our article attempts to respond to these questions by recognizing the multitude of our visual research practices in sexology studies. It brings together methods both ubiquitous and exceptional to point to a research future being built in the present: one that seeks new and more ethical ways of looking at, for, and with the queer patient.
This article examines contemporary discourses within French psychoanalysis through the lens of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the minor. Against the backdrop of anti-trans positions advanced by influential psychoanalytic figures, it analyzes alternative theoretical and clinical perspectives that challenge the discipline's dominant and often normative assumptions. More specifically, the article focuses on the work of two psychoanalysts, Thamy Ayouch and Fabrice Bourlez, both of whom mobilize the concept of the minor to develop queer, trans, and decolonial approaches to psychoanalytic theory and practice. Without overlooking certain tensions, I argue that the minor functions less as a fixed method than as a critical horizon. In this light, the minor challenges claims of universality, foregrounds minoritized forms of experience, and reimagines the unconscious in relation to social, historical, and political powers. The article concludes by considering both the transformative potential and the conceptual limits of this framework for rethinking psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century.
This study investigates how AI tools function as forms of medical sourcery, wherein computational processes become increasingly opaque even as their outputs acquire growing authority. Using a comparative approach that places religion alongside medicine, AI systems are shown to mirror prophetic practice by converting uncertainty into actionable knowledge and transforming probabilistic reasoning into authoritative visions of the future. Rather than deriving legitimacy from transparent reasoning or direct observation, these systems exercise authority through persuasive visualizations that conceal the calculations from which they emerge while rendering projected futures tangible and actionable in the present. In doing so, AI introduces a spectral form of authority that may undermine medicine's commitment to epistemic uncertainty and observation-based verification.
This article examines Brazil’s free psychoanalytic clinics as radical experiments in what I call sanitary emancipation—a mode of mental health care production that links wellbeing to liberation from colonial oppression. Based on ethnographic research with clinical collectives in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and beyond, I argue that these grassroots initiatives mobilise a “corruptive” form of emancipation: an imperfect, materially entangled refusal of purity that emerges from a discipline (psychoanalysis) marked by elitist and patriarchal histories. Through practices of territorial listening—offering sessions in breadlines, public squares and sites of racist police violence—these clinics reimagine care in ways that directly challenge the coloniality of power, knowledge and being embedded in Global Mental Health paradigms. Situated within Brazil’s post-Psychiatric Reform landscape, clinics like Coletivo Pontes da Psicanálise (with its Afro-Brazilian escuta de gira approach) and Margens Clínicas (working in territories scarred by state violence) and several others confront DSM-driven diagnostic logic as a neo-colonising discourse under financial capitalism. Their work critically fulfils the promise of the medical humanities by, first, politicising care as a commons rather than a commodified service; second, fostering situated knowledges grounded in relational and territorial forms of alienation; and third, resisting the de-politicised metrics of global health epidemiology. These unfinished, situated experiments in street psychoanalysis and anti-racist care ethics reveal both radical potential and inevitable capitalist contamination. Ultimately, they offer a compelling model for rethinking mental health through insurgent, place-based and decolonial frameworks.
This study examines representations of transgenerational trauma and healing strategies in Chika Unigwe's The Middle Daughter. The analysis of the novel pays critical attention to the intergenerational transmission of trauma within the mother-middle daughter relationship. Drawing on the tenets of Trauma Theory, the study reveals how silence, emotional repression, and culturally shaped parenting practices contribute to the psychological distress of the protagonist, Nani. Through a close investigation of characterization and events in the narrative, the paper shows how the often-overlooked role of the middle daughter affects emotional visibility and self-perception within the family, yielding to traumatic flashbacks. The analysis further demonstrates that unresolved maternal trauma and cultural expectations influence Nani's romantic and non-romantic relationships, shaping her vulnerability and internalized guilt. Finally, the study discusses Nani's path to healing, through narration, maternal agency, and personal autonomy, arguing that recovery begins with reclaiming one's story and voice. By closely reading the novel alongside the postulations of trauma scholars such as Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, C. N. Van der Merwe, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, the research contributes to trauma studies in African literature by highlighting the psychological cost of inherited silence and the therapeutic import of emotional truth-telling.
This reflection explores the experience of aphasia following a severe stroke and the subsequent loss of a professional identity as a practicing psychologist. Through the process of relearning language, reading, and writing fiction, the author reflects on questions of identity, recovery, and the unfinished nature of medicine, psychology, and human lives. Memories of the author's father, a rural country physician, provide a framework for understanding that healing is not about completing another person's story, but participating in it. Writing serves not as an endpoint but as a continuing process of meaning-making, listening, and beginning again.
