It is a glorious record of the way dreams of a startling academic career, aspirations to be the first or the chosen one, and desires to see all of the everyday as a reference to a fairy tale, smash into the pandemic and motherhood. This is the link to the blog https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/columns/happily/
The factors driving the allocation of resources within the medical system is often not obvious or transparent to the outsider, the patient or their family. One area where it is openly acknowledged is in the media coverage of transplant medicine. There it is repeatedly stated that the number of organs donated or supplied is significantly [...]
The World Health Organization[1] defines violence as ‘the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation. Choosing to go under the knife, a slang [...]
Being deprived of sleep is not only experienced by the patient as discussed in the last post but also by those working within the hospital. This fourth of a series of short essays or reflections on aspects of what could be understood as forms of violence within the practice of medicine turns to the experience [...]
Patients often report serious difficulties with sleeping while in hospital and this experience of deprivation is even more profound when the patient is in ICU. While there is evidence for the impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive functioning in ICU patients it is only ‘associated’ with the onset of ICU delirium or intrusive hallucinatory experiences. [...]
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cold-trauma-suspended-animation A great article written by Natalie Healey published on the wired.co.uk site, raises some interesting questions starting with the basis of the definition of death, through to possible roles for body cooling in the treatment of trauma particularly when trying to increase the odds of survival for patients who have bleed out half of [...]
The American medical humanities scholar Kathleen Powers questions the notion that the violence within hospitals or within medicine is tempered by metaphor and discretion. Rather, she considers the metaphoric language used in hospitals to be a language of violence, or a language of war. In a 2017 paper she outlined the militaristic and violent frameworks [...]
Fiona Davies, Blood on Silk: The Violence of Medicine I (detail) 2020. Conceptual Background: The American academic Johanna Shapiro in a 2018 essay establishes a framework of types of violence in medicine that ranges from the systemic bureaucratic “organisational violence”, originating from the hospital’s architecture and design, noise levels, access to public transport, and the [...]
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