This paper introduces an approach to ethical inquiry inspired by Emily Dickinson’s investigative poetic approach and framed by the concept of sideshadowing. The purpose of this approach is to elucidate the human experience of dying and direct our ethical attention accordingly. Sideshadowing is a concept that opens a middle realm of possibilities. Engaging with possibility through sideshadowing can guide bioethics’ self-analysis of what holds and deserves attention. The bioethical response to dying is primarily focused on medical decisions and the physicality of death, which does not help us understand death as much as we think it does, nor does it meet the needs of dying people. Dickinson’s poetic approach adds an investigative layer to human perception that may question what we pay attention to and add new dimensions to understandings of human reality. Dickinson shows what is possible by engaging with dying as an art.
In this review essay I outline how the current renaissance of psychedelics in mainstream discourses about medicine is spearheaded first and foremost by profit-oriented technomedical initiatives focusing on individual wellness, and how this very situation reinforces a problematic line of demarcation between the psychopharmaceutical approach to mental health, and the more classical approach that relies on intersubjective talk therapy. It will lead me to formulate brief remarks about the unique challenges that this context presents for the field of medical humanities-specifically regarding the status of narratives in therapy and their existential implications.
The language used to describe the ending of a pregnancy is contested, and the contest has consequences for stigma, recognition and access to care. In English, the late twentieth-century shift from 'spontaneous abortion' to 'miscarriage' is often told as growing compassion. Comparing English with Italian, French and German, I argue that the shift is better understood as the relocation of stigma rather than its removal. English, having no separate everyday word for miscarriage, engineered a shift through deliberate professional reform. French and German did so centuries ago. Italian never developed one and relies on a single term, aborto, for both miscarriage and abortion. Yet none of these words is neutral. Each locates a judgement somewhere: in the failing body, in the falseness of the loss or in a moral hierarchy of deservingness. To name a pregnancy ending is to classify it, and classification is never neutral: it takes a position on what was lost, and what was lost is precisely what remains contested. The rejection of much clinical vocabulary by people with lived experience, the emergence of new terms such as the German kleine Geburt ('little birth'), and live debate in France over fausse couche suggest that the search for adequate language is ongoing everywhere and raise the question of who is consulted. The task is not to choose better among inherited words but to keep making new ones, attentive to whose voices are present, across clinical, public and creative practice.
The vast and complex terminology of clinical neuroscience often drives students towards rote memorisation, yielding short-term recall but undermining long-term retention and the humanistic connection between words and meaning. To address this, we introduce neuroetymology as a formal, scalable pedagogical framework that differs from general medical etymology or narrative medicine by focusing specifically on the terminology of clinical neuroscience. It operationalises a set of teaching practices that link terminology to narrative, critical reflection and clinical application, transforming passive recall into active, meaning-based learning. Inspired by the historical scholarship of medical historian Owsei Temkin, neuroetymology views medical terms as living archives of human thought, preserving layers of historical, cultural and scientific meaning across changing systems of knowledge. By examining terms from neuroanatomy, neuropsychiatry and neuropharmacology, we demonstrate its dual utility: enhancing mnemonic retention through narrative encoding while fostering critical reflection on the biases and cultural assumptions embedded in medical language. Beyond cognitive gains, neuroetymology promotes ethical reasoning and cultural sensitivity by exposing students to the hidden histories of terms such as hysteria and schizophrenia , encouraging more inclusive, non-stigmatising clinical communication. It also addresses global inclusivity by integrating non-Western metaphors and cultural contexts. In conclusion, neuroetymology reframes medical terminology not as a barrier to learning but as a bridge between scientific precision and humanistic insight, offering a practical pathway towards a more reflective, empathetic and intellectually engaged generation of clinicians.
Medically derived data and imagery (eg, ultrasound, CT, MRI) has the potential to open up the meaning of pregnancy and child loss beyond the diagnostic. This paper examines how such data and imagery can be subject to artistic translation and remediation as a way of exploring the complexities of grief and loss. Drawing on work within the medical humanities, the social sciences and the arts, the paper reports on how an artistic engagement with medical data and imagery can carefully and ethically be employed to explore issues of grief and loss. This is further located within an ‘ethics of care’ which, following Puig de la Bellacasa, treats care (of medical data, participants and audiences) as a methodological problem. I discuss three particular artworks— Gestationality (2022), Subcutaneous (2023) and The Topography Table (2023)—that were constituent parts of the performative installation Loss is Mine and is Stored within this Body (2025). In the process, I show how such concepts as haptic visuality and scale were central to the specific artistic practices and the artworks themselves, serving to open up the experience of grief and loss in the final performative installation. I conclude by suggesting that a visual and multisensory artistic practice, partly considered through a critical medical humanities’ framing, can have a significant role in highlighting issues that surround pregnancy and child loss.
The proliferation of consumer health technologies that allow individuals to measure and monitor biometrical parameters of uncertain clinical significance facilitates the decoupling of disease and illness. Drawing on Baudrillard’s account of the successive phases of the image, this paper maps the migration of clinical signs through four stages: disease, predisease, statistical risk and self-referential. This final stage is described as metricorexia, a preoccupation with self-recorded biometrical data that has become dissociated from recognised disease. Using a hypothetical example alongside emerging and contested clinical entities, the paper explores the emergence of algorithmic authority and questions how clinicians can respond to this challenge. I propose a hyper-real medicine that acknowledges this separation from material reality and adopts narrative-based medicine to understand the meaning of these metrics for the patient.
Steve Haines' and Sophie Standing's Really Strange comics (Pain is Really Strange (2015), Trauma is Really Strange (2015) and Anxiety is Really Strange (2018)) blend graphical narrative with medical science to tackle phenomena often deemed 'invisible' or medically perplexing. Using a visual medical humanities lens, the article situates the Really Strange series in the context of graphical medicine and explores how visual and narrative strategies can both democratise medical knowledge and inadvertently reinforce certain 'regimes of proof'. A core focus is the credibility problem surrounding chronic pain, psychological trauma and anxiety, subjective experiences frequently met with doubt because they evade direct visual proof. The comics confront this problem through a visual politics of credibility, borrowing imagery and conventions from scientific discourse to substantiate knowledge and validate personal experience. It is written for medical humanities and graphical medicine scholars, clinical educators and practitioners interested in communication, psychoeducation and the ethical problem of credibility in relation to pain, trauma and anxiety. Its purpose is to show how comics can help readers understand, discuss and teach invisible forms of suffering that are often difficult to verify through conventional biomedical means. The article also proposes graphical medicine literacy as an extension of visual literacy: the ability to read comics not only as accessible illustrations but as layered medicovisual texts that shape how illness, evidence, testimony and care are understood.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) are serious and disabling long-term conditions characterised by uncertainty surrounding their aetiology, diagnosis and treatment. People with ME/CFS struggle to be understood, taken seriously and supported with their illness. At least since the 1990s, ME and CFS have been considered by many to be related, overlapping or synonymous with one another. However, the concepts originated from different sociohistorical contexts. This article disentangles the histories of ME and CFS, roots them in the UK and the USA respectively, and compares how they emerged as medical and scientific objects. Drawing on a critical literature analysis of medical texts between 1950 and 1990, I explore how both ME and CFS materialised through the regulation of uncertainty within biomedical systems. In both cases, uncertainty was transformed into knowledge by systematically obscuring certain aspects of illness. These transformations shaped what could be known about these conditions in the decades to come and may be at the root of the epistemic injustices experienced by patients. Those who campaign for more scientific research into ME/CFS should be wary of the propensity for biomedicine to generate ignorance in the face of these complex conditions. This analysis contributes to a growing body of research on the medical sociology of ignorance, further illustrating the value of uncertainty and ignorance as heuristic tools for understanding the politics of knowledge production within biomedical systems.
The article positions artist-led research as a vital methodology for an engaged, transformative and translational medical humanities. Recent scholarship aligned with the critical visual medical humanities has drawn attention to art practices as epistemologically generative, suggesting that the methods of criticality mobilised by artists offer a distinctive and valuable approach to addressing questions of health. In line with this approach, this article proposes artist Jacqueline Donachie's sustained collaborative enquiry into the science and lived experience of myotonic dystrophy as a compelling example of how artist-led research can reshape the way scientists and clinicians engage with and understand a particular condition. Donachie's practice demonstrates how artistic methods-dialogue, observation, ethnographic engagement and aesthetic distillation-can productively entangle scientific and experiential knowledge, foregrounding the perspectives of families and patients whose insights have historically been marginal to genetic research and clinical care. By bringing different expert cultures together in mutually generative conversation, Donachie's practice raises important questions about how different forms of knowledge are mobilised, and how they might inform and enrich one another. The article contributes to ongoing efforts to conceptualise collaborative knowledge-producing practices across the (visual) medical humanities by advancing the figure of the critical interloper, a practitioner who works between epistemic spaces, drawing together diverse knowledge systems in ways that challenge, unsettle and ultimately bring about change.
Obstetric violence has emerged as a powerful yet contested term that describes harmful and abusive practices and institutional and systemic failings in reproductive healthcare. While its origins lie in Latin American legal and activist movements, the term has since entered English-language academic literature across multiple disciplines. This article presents a meta-narrative review of how obstetric violence has been conceptualised in scholarly work published in English. Drawing from research traditions spanning law, ethics, philosophy, medicine, midwifery, health research and the social sciences, we trace the evolution of the term and examine definitional trends, disciplinary variations and conceptual tensions.Our analysis reveals that obstetric violence is not a fixed or singular concept but an evolving and contested framework shaped by disciplinary perspectives, sociocultural contexts and ideological commitments. Definitions vary widely, with some scholars anchoring the term in the Venezuelan legal definition, while others resist formal definitions altogether, using obstetric violence as a tool to explore structural inequalities and systemic harms. Typologies are used inconsistently, functioning both as descriptive accounts and as structured lists that categorise different forms of harm across fields. We also highlight how universalising tendencies in the literature risk obscuring local realities and how the experiences of gender-diverse populations remain largely absent.Rather than resolving definitional ambiguity, the literature reveals how such ambiguity reflects the complexity of violence in reproductive healthcare and the different frameworks through which it is understood. Our review highlights that obstetric violence functions as a plural and evolving concept, shaped by varying disciplinary perspectives, social contexts and epistemic assumptions. This pluralism may complicate efforts to define or operationalise the term consistently across academic, legal and policy contexts, but it also reflects the unsettled nature of the field and the diversity of experiences it seeks to capture.
This article examines how early 21st-century Indian short films reconfigure masculinity in the wake of economic liberalisation, non-governmental organisation-led public health interventions and the AIDS crisis. Reading Vishal Bhardwaj's Blood Brothers (2007) and Farhan Akhtar's Positive (2007) as cultural texts produced within pharmaceutical capitalism, the paper argues that these films do more than raise HIV awareness: they participate in the making of a biopolitical masculinity that ties male identity to risk management, medical compliance and therapeutic responsibility. Drawing on medical humanities, masculinity studies and Vinh-Kim Nguyen's concept of 'therapeutic citizenship' (2005), the article demonstrates how condom use, antiretroviral therapy and self-surveillance are framed as moral and civic obligations, rendering men governable, productive and socially legible. At the same time, these films negotiate older Hindu masculine ideals of restraint, family protection and bodily discipline, producing a tense overlap between renunciatory ethics and neoliberal imperatives of consumption and pleasure. Through close visual analysis, the paper traces how shame, guilt and responsibility circulate as affects that must be managed, displaced or transformed in order to sustain this new masculine order. By situating these films within India's HIV landscape, the paper advances medical humanities scholarship on gender and health and opens new avenues for studying how cinematic narratives shape the emotional and ethical labour of becoming a 'therapeutic' male citizen in contemporary India.
This paper examines Susan Abulhawa's The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015) in terms of its depiction of the deteriorating healthcare system in Gaza under Israeli control and the siege imposed since 2007. Through the lens of the critical medical humanities, the paper explores the novel's indictment of systemic medical deprivation as a means of political domination. To achieve this purpose, the paper delves into narrative medicine's depiction of patients suffering as a result of denied access to proper treatment, traditional healers providing healthcare through herbal remedies and besieged doctors operating under hard conditions. By so doing, the paper reflects on how the political conflict and restricted access to healthcare in Gaza shape the lived experience of illness and healing, enriching literary scholarship on diaspora literatures as well as the field of the critical medical humanities.
How should we put the experiences of young children into language? What are the ethics of using one's words to describe the world of an other? Particularly those who do not linguistically live their experiences? This paper explores these questions by dwelling on the topics of pain and suffering as experienced by newborns receiving medical care. We are stuck with a certain sense of ethical dis-ease that the words we use to describe the lived experiences of newborns ultimately cannot help being insufficient, imperfect, inadequate, incomplete or otherwise, such that they must be offered with humility, wonder and care. And yet, this does not diminish the need to orient to a child's world, to avert and respond to their possible experiences of pain and suffering.
BACKGROUND:A tension between free will and determinism shapes narratives of type 2 diabetes and obesity, contributing to stigma and defining how these conditions are culturally understood. METHODS:This research involved an interdisciplinary analysis drawing on philosophy, narrative theory and illness narrative scholarship. It undertakes close readings of two remission memoirs-William Banting's Letter on Corpulence (1863) and Tom Watson's Downsizing (2020)-in dialogue with Augustine's redemptive and conversion narrative, Confessions. RESULTS:Discourses of metabolic illness oscillate between models of personal responsibility and biological determinism. Subjects are both blamed and rendered passive. In contrast, Banting's and Watson's remission memoirs mobilise a redemptive narrative form structured by deficiency, transformation and renewal. The two texts, written a century and a half apart, assert the authors' agency while positioning them as generative people who seek to transform others. They contest dominant biomedical and institutional narratives that marginalise patient voice and prioritise clinical authority. CONCLUSIONS:This article links two memoirs of metabolic illness to a tradition of redemptive story-telling, asking for a rethinking of agency, responsibility and transformation regarding type 2 diabetes. There are implications for both clinical practice and cultural understanding.
The Thatcherite 1980s saw in Britain the reversal of many taken-for-granted social compacts regarding community and care. Amidst a broader economic downturn and stagnating state funding, few institutions felt this apparent decline in welfare standards quite as much as the National Health Service. A prelude to the more substantial neoliberal reorganisation of the system that would occur under the Major government, the period nonetheless saw a newfound reliance on the private sector and charitable outreach as a means of supplementing increasingly meagre resources. Drawing upon extensive archival research, contemporary press coverage and publicity materials, I look at the first large-scale healthcare fundraiser in the history of the service: Great Ormond Street Hospital's 1987-1989 Wishing Well campaign. Developed by the struggling children's hospital, I argue that Wishing Well served to legitimise, both rhetorically and economically, a highly contingent form of fundraising-the charitable appeal-via a resource for which it did not lack: children. Through the lens of Lauren Berlant's theory of 'cruel optimism', I investigate the use of a figure that made countless demands of futurity, care and the overcoming of impairment as they specifically related to childhood. By positioning these poster children as the naive, compromised dependents of a giving public, the sympathetic response was individualised, each act of compassion sustaining an idea of futurity that is itself highly precarious. Their childishness was critical to the venture. Lee Edelman argues that the child has been used throughout modernity to enforce compulsory, future-tense narrative stability; in turn, I note that the ideological requirement for children to 'grow up' he highlights has itself been similarly conflated with their need to 'grow out' of ill health. Though hitched to the presumption of an able-normative future, these poster children nonetheless exist in tension with their own precarious present-if not to overcome, then endure.
Total laryngectomy permanently deprives patients of their vocal apparatus. While the communicative consequences of voice loss have been widely discussed, its implications for professional identity remain underexplored when the patient is a practising physician. This paper presents an autoethnographic account of a physician who returned to clinical work after total laryngectomy, relying on text-to-speech technologies, written communication and embodied interaction.Although artificial voice and digital tools enabled effective informational exchange, they did not fully restore a sense of authentic medical practice. The absence of one's own voice generated a persistent unease, experienced as a form of self-alienation when a technologically mediated self was presented as the speaking physician. This tension became particularly salient in one-to-many settings such as public lectures, where vocal authority traditionally underpins professional legitimacy.In everyday clinical practice, additional compensatory strategies emerged. Despite the adequacy of mediated communication, face-to-face encounters were intentionally maintained, allowing tacit modes of collaboration to develop organically. Drawing on an ethnomethodological perspective, these practices are interpreted as the formation of 'our ways' of working together-locally produced methods sustained through bodily co-presence rather than formal protocols.Although artificial voice and digital tools enabled effective informational exchange, they did not fully restore a sense of authentic medical practice. The absence of one's own voice generated a persistent unease, experienced as a form of self-alienation when a technologically mediated self was presented as the speaking physician. This tension became particularly salient in one-to-many settings, such as public lectures, where vocal authority traditionally underpins professional legitimacy.
