This paper examines Lauren Slater’s memoir, Prozac Diary, to understand the role of language in reimagining the notion of recovery. Written from the standpoint of a consumer of antidepressant drugs, ...

One leitmotif that medical humanities shares with phenomenology and most contemporary medical ethics is emphasising the importance of appreciating the patient as a whole person and not merely as an ...

The literature on pain has so far been primarily interested in chronic pain, medically induced pain and pain as an unwanted experience. However, pain is a more complicated experience and the lines ...

Illness narratives have traditionally been used as a conceptual tool for exploring experiences of chronic illness or disease. In this paper, I suggest that Frank's typology of illness narratives ...

While recent medical innovation shows great promise in treating hepatitis C (HCV), it remains a condition associated with profound stigma. HCV is a bloodborne virus (BBV) most commonly transmitted in ...

Jane Austen’s letters describe a two-year deterioration into bed-ridden exhaustion, with unusual colouring, bilious attacks and rheumatic pains. In 1964, Zachary Cope postulated tubercular Addison’s ...

Correspondence to Mrs Charlotte Duffee, University of Toronto Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7, Canada; charlotte.marcotte.toale{at}mail.utoronto ...

It is generally accepted that the practice of medicine could be improved by turning to the humanities in general, and to narrative and text interpretation in particular. Neverthless, there is hardly ...

The term ‘zoster’ is nowadays associated with ‘herpes zoster’, the condition resulting from reactivation of the latent varicella-zoster virus which causes shingles. But in antiquity the meaning of ...

Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College, South Kensington, London, UK Correspondence to Diana Davenport, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine ...

This paper argues that analysing past public health policies calls for scholarship that integrates insights not just from medical history but from a broad range of historical fields. Recent studies of ...

The primary claim of this paper is that understanding the stigma so commonly endured by chronic pain sufferers today in the USA and the UK is unlikely without proper appreciation of the history of ...