Essayist Susan Sontag alerted us more than 20 years ago to the way in which clusters of metaphors attach themselves to our discussion of certain diseases, and the influence these metaphors exert on ...

This May, the World Health Assembly (WHA) will vote on re-establishing a mandate for the WHO to address the health consequences of nuclear weapons and war.1 Health professionals and their associations ...

Social prescription (SP) entails a model of care where healthcare professionals can help address the social determinants of health by prescribing non-medical activities such as time in community ...

The Visual Medical Humanities are both old and new. For centuries, artists and anatomists have collaborated in their explorations into the workings of the human body. More recently, there have been ...

Objectives To review the extant literature on HIV criminal laws, and to determine the impact of these laws on public health practice. Methods The available research on this topic was obtained and ...

In the pursuit to offer validity and lineage to the modern diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), non-historical scholars often remove ancient episodes from their social context and ...

There is now a context for teaching humanities in undergraduate medical education via special study modules (SSMs). This paper discusses the instrumental and non-instrumental role of the humanities in ...

As the head of a university-wide health humanities programme and a consultant ‘Humanities Lead’ to our medical school, I am often asked how to build arts and humanities-based sessions within the ...

Footnotes Richard Meakin is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Medical Humanities Unit, Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences, Royal Free andUniversity College Medical School, London.

Medicine and portraiture are entwined in intimate and distinctive ways. Thus portraits connected with health and medicine provide promising material for the medical humanities. In order for them to ...

Among the growing number of works of graphic fiction, a number of titles dealing directly with the patient experience of illness or caring for others with an illness are to be found. Thanks in part to ...

The papers in this issue by Wall and Howath and colleagues provide a much-needed focus on the ways in which images of genitalia carry implicit messages about what is normative and thus acceptable (see ...