Routledge Advances in the Medical Humanities – serie

Reconsidering Dementia Narratives explores the role of narrative in developing new ways of understanding, interacting with, and caring for people with dementia. It asks how the stories we tell about dementia – in fiction, life writing and film – both reflect and shape the way we think about this important condition.Highlighting the need to attend to embodied and relational aspects of identity in dementia, the study further outlines ways in which narratives may contribute to dementia care, while disputing the idea that the modes of empathy fostered by narrative necessarily bring about more humane care practices. This cross-medial analysis represents an interdisciplinary approach to dementia narratives which range across auto/biography, graphic narrative, novel, film, documentary and collaborative storytelling practices. The book aims to clarify the limits and affordances of narrative, and narrative studies, in relation to an ethically driven medical humanities agenda through the use of case studies.Answering the key question of whether dementia narratives align with or run counter to the dominant discourse of dementia as ‘loss of self’, this innovative book will be of interest to anyone interested in dementia studies, ageing studies, narrative studies in health care, and critical medical humanities.

Educating Doctors’ Senses Through the Medical Humanities: "How Do I Look?" uses the medical diagnostic method to identify a chronic symptom in medical culture: the unintentional production of insensibility through compulsory mis-education. This book identifies the symptom and its origins and offers an intervention: deliberate and planned education of sensibility through the introduction of medical humanities to the core undergraduate medicine and surgery curriculum. To change medical culture is an enormous challenge, and this book sets out how to do this by answering the following questions: How has a compulsory mis-education for insensibility developed in medical culture and medical education? How is sensibility capital generated, who ‘owns’ it and how is it distributed, mal-distributed and re-distributed? What is the place of resistance (or ‘dissensus’) in this process? How can the symptom of a ‘developed’ insensibility be addressed pedagogically through introduction of the medical humanities as core and integrated curriculum provision? How can both the identity constructions of doctors and doctor–patient relationships be tied up with education for sensibility? How can artists work with clinicians, through the medical humanities in medical education, to better educate sensibility? The book will be of interest to all medical educators and clinicians, including those health and social care professionals outside of medicine who work with doctors.

While medical language is soaked in metaphor, and thinking with metaphor is central to diagnostic work, medicine – that is, medical culture, clinical practice and medical education – outwardly rejects metaphor for objective, literal scientific language. This thought-provoking book argues that this is a misstep, and critically considers what embracing the use of metaphors and similes might mean for shaping medical culture, and especially the doctor–patient relationship, in a healthy way.Thinking With Metaphors in Medicine explores: how metaphors inhabit medicine – sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse – and how these metaphors can be revealed, appreciated and understood; how diagnostic work utilizes thinking with metaphors; how patient–doctor communication can be better understood and enhanced as a metaphorical exchange; how the landscape of medicine is historically shaped by leading or didactic metaphors, such as ‘the body as machine’ and ‘medicine as war’, which may conflict with other values or perspectives on healthcare, for instance, person-centred care. Outlining the kinds of metaphors and resemblances that inhabit medicine and how they shape practices and identities of doctors, colleagues and patients, this book demonstrates how the landscape of medicine may be reshaped through metaphor shift. It is an important work for all those interested in the use of language and rhetoric in medicine, whether hailing from a humanities, social science or healthcare background.

This book is a critical response to a range of problems – some theoretical, others empirical – that shape questions surrounding the lived experience of suffering. It explores how moral and ethical questions of personal suffering are experienced, contested, negotiated and institutionalised. Bodies and Suffering investigates the moral labour and significance invested in actions to care for others, or in failing to do so. It also explores circumstances – personal, political and social – under which that which is perceived as non-moral becomes moral.Drawing on case studies and empirical research, Bodies and Suffering examines the idea of the suffering body across different cultures and contexts and the experience and treatment of these suffering bodies. The book draws on theories of affect, embodiment, the phenomenology of illness and moralities of care, to produce a nuanced understanding of suffering as being located across the assumed borders of time, space, bodies, persons and things.Suitable for bioethicists, medical anthropologists, health sociologists and body studies scholars, Bodies and Suffering will also be of use on health science courses as essential reading on suffering bodies, mental health and morality and ethics issues.

Person-centred health care is increasingly endorsed as a key element of high-quality care, yet, in practice, it often means patient-centred health care. This book scrutinizes the principle of primacy of patient welfare, which, although deeply embedded in health professionalism, is long overdue for critical analysis and debate. It appears incontestable because patients have greater immediate health needs than clinicians and the patient-clinician encounter is often recognized as a moral enterprise as well as a service contract. However, Buetow argues that the implication that clinician welfare is secondary can harm clinicians, patients and health system performance.Revaluing participants in health care as moral equals, this book advocates an ethic of virtue to respect the clinician as a whole person whose self-care and care from patients can benefit both parties, because their moral interests intertwine and warrant equal consideration. It then considers how to move from values including moral equality in health care to practice for people in their particular situations. Developing a genuinely inclusive concept of person-centred care – accepting clinicians as moral equals – it also facilitates the coalescence of patient-centred care and evidence-based health care.This reflective and provocative work develops a constructive alternative to the taken-for-granted principle of primacy of patient welfare. It is of interest to students and academics in the health and caring sciences, philosophy, ethics, medical humanities and health management.

Following criticisms of the traditionally polarized view of understanding suffering through either medicine or social justice, Lowe makes a compelling argument for how the medical humanities can help to go beyond the traditional biographical and epistemic breaks to see into the nature and properties of suffering and what is at stake. Lowe demonstrates through analysis of major healthcare workforce issues and incidence of burnout how key policies and practices influence healthcare education and experiences of both patients and health professionals. By including first person narratives from health professionals as a tool and resource, she illustrates how dominant ideas about the self enter practice as a refusal of suffering. Demonstrating the relationship between personal experience, theory and research, Lowe argues for a pedagogy of suffering that shows how the moral anguish implicit in suffering is an ethical response of the emergent self. This is an important read for all those interested in medical humanities, health professional education, person-centred care and the sociology of health and illness.

This innovative volume provides fresh perspectives on how medical students and patients construct identities in relation to each other, using stories of their clinical encounters. It explores how paying attention to medical students’ and patients’ stories in clinical teaching encounters can encourage empathy and the formation of professional identities that embody desirable values such as integrity and respect. Written by an experienced clinician and based on original, rigorous research combining ethnography and dialogic narrative analysis, Storytelling Encounters as Medical Education: Crafting Relational Identity includes patient stories alongside those of students and clinical teachers. This is an important contribution for all those interested in medical education, narrative medicine, person-centred care and identity formation in healthcare. It will also be of value to scholars in a range of other disciplines, who are using a dialogic approach.

This book explores how person-centred health care could be refined to help persons alleviate pain-related distress and construct pain as a potentially positive experience. Rethinking Pain in Person-Centred Health Care is a fascinating contribution to the multidisciplinary literature on person-centred health care, pain and ethics.Traditionally, Western intellectual culture has downplayed the intuitive and emotional, promoting instead rational, natural-scientific perspectives. Applied to pain, an instrumental approach promotes the immediate and effective relief of pain, due to the widespread suffering and expense it can cause. However, different persons experience pain in different ways and Buetow moves beyond a commitment to eliminate pain to exploring how benefits of pain could include creating and managing meaning from pain. Rather than always looking to put pain behind them, persons may flourish by moving around pain, through pain, into pain and above pain. Buetow argues that this model depends on adopting a person-centred approach to health care, focusing less on the condition of pain and more on mobilizing the persons who present with, and manage, pain. This book will be of interest to professionals and academics/researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry who have a special interest in people with persistent pain conditions. It will also be an invaluable resource for physiotherapists, chronic pain consultants in secondary care and GPs.

Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread ‘problem’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘burden’ and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition.Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be ‘imagined’, this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the ‘lived’ experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to understand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively.Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers.

Pain. Chronic digestive symptoms. Poor sleep. Neuropathy. Sensory disturbances. Fatigue. Panic. Constant illness and discomfort. Frequent difficulty coping with work, school, relationships. Despite the common experience of being told that it’s all in their heads, that they’re just making themselves sick, individuals with these symptoms are experiencing a very real, sometimes debilitating, illness phenomenon. But what is it? Physical or mental illness? Political or social identity? Cultural, narrative, or discursive construction? When something goes awry at the intersection of mind and body – the psychosomatic – what is happening? Widely recognized, yet difficult to classify, diagnose, treat, and explain, psychosomatic disorders are heavily stigmatized, and the associated syndromes have become the site of controversy and antipathy in the provider–patient relationship. In popular culture, terms such as medically unexplained symptoms, hysteria, neurasthenia, hypochondria, functional illness, and malingering are misunderstood, unknown, or rejected outright. Meanwhile, perspectives from cultural and textual studies focus on the psychosomatic as a metaphor in art, literature, and popular media, where disruptions of the body and mind are regularly made to stand in for individual alienation and cultural malaise. Bringing together multiple perspectives, this challenging volume tackles causes, and innovative, humanistic solutions, to conflicts in the provider–patient relationship; uses the psychosomatic as a lens for theorizing the self in culture; and examines the metaphorical potential of the psychosomatic in fictional narrative.Providing a unique assemblage of interdisciplinary, international approaches to understanding the problem of the psychosomatic in both expert and lay discourses, this pioneering edited collection is aimed at students and researchers of health, popular culture, and the health care humanities.

As digital life stories continue to assume more and more significance across a range of institutions, so too does their potential to bring into focus once marginalised and neglected voices. Breaking new ground by reframing multimedia life stories as a resource for education, public health, and policy, this book challenges policymakers, professionals, and researchers to reimagine how they find out about and respond to people’s daily lives and experiences of health, disability, and well-being. The book develops theoretical, methodological, and practical resources for listening to digital stories through a series of carefully selected international case studies, from dementia care education to campaigns in the UN to ban cluster munitions. The case studies explore and illuminate different ways that digital stories have – and have not – been listened to in the past. The authors expose the great potential as well as the complexity of using powerful personal stories in practice. Together, the case studies highlight that processes of listening to, learning from, and making use of digital stories involve unavoidable processes of reinterpretation, recontextualisation, and translation which have significant ethical and political implications for storytellers, listeners, and society. In mapping and theorising the movement of stories into new contexts of policy and practice, the book offers a critical lens on the widely celebrated democratising potential of digital storytelling and its capacity to amplify marginalised voices. Digital Storytelling in Health and Social Policy develops an authoritative and original re-conceptualisation of digital life stories and their use for social justice ends, and will be important reading for researchers and practitioners from a range of backgrounds, including social policy, digital media, communication, education, disability, and public health.

The Face of AIDS film archive at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, consists of more than 700 hours of unedited and edited footage, shot over a period of more than thirty years and all over the world by filmmaker and journalist Staffan Hildebrand. The material documents the HIV/AIDS pandemic and includes scenes from conferences and rallies, and interviews with activists, physicians, people with the infection, and researchers. It represents a global historical development from the early years of the AIDS crisis to a situation in which it is possible to live a normal life with the HIV virus. This volume brings together a range of academic perspectives – from media and film studies, medical history, gender studies, history, and cultural studies – to bear on the archive, shedding light on memories, discourses, trauma, and activism. Using a medical humanities framework, the editors explore the influence of historical representations of HIV/AIDS and stigma in a world where antiretroviral treatment has fundamentally altered the conditions under which many people diagnosed with HIV live. Organized into four sections, this book begins by introducing the archive and its role, setting it in a global context. The first part looks at methodological, legal and ethical issues around archiving memories of the present which are then used to construct histories of the past; something that can be particularly controversial when dealing with a socially stigmatized epidemic such as HIV/AIDS. The second section is devoted to analyses of particular films from the archive, looking at the portrayal of people living with HIV/AIDS, the narrative of HIV as a chronic illness and the contemporary context of particular films. The third section looks at how stigma and trauma are negotiated in the material in the Face of AIDS film archive, discussing ideas about suffering and culpability. The final section contributes perspectives on and by the filmmaker as activist and auteur. This interdisciplinary collection is placed at the intersection of medical humanities, sexuality studies and film and media studies, continuing a tradition of studies on the cultural and social understandings of HIV/AIDS.

Medicine, Health and Being Human begins a conversation to explore how the medical has defined us: that is, the ways in which perspectives of medicine and health have affected cultural understandings of what it means to be human.With chapters that span from the early modern period through to the contemporary world, and are drawn from a range of disciplines, this volume holds that incremental historical and cultural influences have brought about an understanding of humanity in which the medical is ingrained, consciously or unconsciously, usually as a mode of legitimisation. Divided into three parts, the book follows a narrative path from the integrity of the human soul, through to the integrity of the material human body, then finally brought together through engaging with end-of-life responses. Part 1 examines the move from spirituality to psychiatry in terms of the way medical science has influenced cultural understandings of the mind. Part 2 interrogates the role that medicine has played in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in constructing and deconstructing the self and other, including the fusion of visual objectivity and the scientific gaze in constructing perceptions of humanity. Part 3 looks at the limits of medicine when the integrity of one body breaks down. It contends with the ultimate question of the extent to which humanity is confined within the integrity of the human body, and how medicine and the humanities work together toward responding to the finality of death.This is a valuable contribution for all those interested in the medical humanities, history of medicine, history of ideas and the social approaches to health and illness.

This book builds on the person-centred medicine movement to promote a shift in the philosophy of care of distress. It discusses the vital importance of whole person health, healing and growth. Developing a new transdisciplinary concept of sense of safety, this book argues that the whole person needs to be understood within their context and relationships and explores the appraisal and coping systems that are part of health.Using clinical vignettes to illustrate her argument, Lynch draws on an understanding of attachment, and trauma-informed approaches to life story and counsels against an over-reliance on symptom-based fragmentation of body and mind.Integrating literature from social determinants of health, psychology, psychotherapy, education and the social sciences with new research from the fields of immunology, endocrinology and neurology, this broad-ranging book is relevant to all those with an interest in person-centred healthcare, including academics and practitioners from medicine, nursing, mental health and public health.

This book builds on the person-centred medicine movement to promote a shift in the philosophy of care of distress. It discusses the vital importance of whole person health, healing and growth. Developing a new transdisciplinary concept of sense of safety, this book argues that the whole person needs to be understood within their context and relationships and explores the appraisal and coping systems that are part of health.Using clinical vignettes to illustrate her argument, Lynch draws on an understanding of attachment, and trauma-informed approaches to life story and counsels against an over-reliance on symptom-based fragmentation of body and mind.Integrating literature from social determinants of health, psychology, psychotherapy, education and the social sciences with new research from the fields of immunology, endocrinology and neurology, this broad-ranging book is relevant to all those with an interest in person-centred healthcare, including academics and practitioners from medicine, nursing, mental health and public health.

This book examines the phenomenon of physician-authors. Focusing on the books that contemporary doctors write--the stories that they tell--with contributors critically engaging their work. A selection of original chapters from leading scholars in medical and health humanities analyze the literary output of doctors, including Oliver Sacks, Danielle Ofri, Atul Gawande, Louise Aronson, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Abraham Verghese. Discussing issues of moral meaning in the works of contemporary doctor-writers, from memoir to poetry, this collection reflects some of the diversity of medicine today. A key reference for all students and scholars of medical and health humanities, the book will be especially useful for those interested in the relationship between literature and practising medicine.

This book critically analyses how politics and power affect the ways that medicine is taught and learned. Challenging society’s historic reluctance to connect the realm of politics to the realm of medicine, Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice: The Contradiction Cure emphasizes the need for medical students to engage with social justice issues, including global health crises resulting from the climate emergency, and the health implications of widening social inequality. Arguing for an increased focus on community-based learning, rather than acute care, this innovative text maps the territory of medicine’s contradictory engagement with politics as a springboard for creative curriculum design. It demonstrates why the socially disempowered - such as political and climate refugees, the homeless, or those without health insurance should be primary subjects of attention for medical students, while exploring how political engagement can be refined, sharp, cultivated and creative, engaging imagination and demanding innovationExploring how the medical humanities can promote engagement with politics to improve medical education, this book is a ground-breaking and inspiring contribution. It is an essential read for all those with a focus on medical education and medical humanities, as well as medical and healthcare students with an interest in the social determinants of health.

This book provides an alternative, complementary approach to the existing conventional approaches to religious and spiritually oriented coping. By focusing on the role of culture, the authors take into account the methods employed by a vast number of people who do not directly identify themselves as religious. The empirical data used in this book derive from studies conducted in several countries; Sweden, China, South Korea, Turkey and Malaysia, across which religion plays a different role in the social and cultural life of individuals. This approach and these empirical data are unique and allow comparisons to be made between different cultural settings.By introducing the concept of meaning-making coping, the authors explore the influence of culture on choice of coping methods, be they purely religious, spiritual or existential. The term "existential meaning-making coping" is used to describe coping methods that are related to existential questions; these methods include religious, spiritual and existential coping methods.Meaning-making Methods for Coping with Serious Illness contributes to new approaches and theoretical models of coping. As such it is an invaluable resource for health care, medical, public health and sociology students and researchers. It will also be of interest to educators and policy-makers working in the area of health.

Providing a critical humanities approach to ageing, this book addresses new directions in age studies: the meaning and workings of "ageism" in the twenty-first century, the vexed relationship between age and disability studies, the meanings and experiences of "queer" aging; the fascinating, yet often elided work of age activists; and, finally, the challenges posed by AI and, more generally, transhumanism in the context of caring for an ageing population. Divided into four parts: Part I: What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Part II: Aging: Old Age and Disability Part III: Aging, Old Age, and Activism Part IV: Old Age and Humanistic Approaches to Care the volume provides an innovative, two-part structure that facilitates rather than merely encourages interdisciplinary collaboration across the humanities and social sciences. Each essay is thus followed by two short critical responses from disciplinary viewpoints that diverge from that of the essay’s author. Drawing on work from across the humanities - philosophy, fine arts, religion, and literature, this book will be a useful supplemental text for courses on age studies, sociology and gerontology at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

Providing a critical humanities approach to ageing, this book addresses new directions in age studies: the meaning and workings of "ageism" in the twenty-first century, the vexed relationship between age and disability studies, the meanings and experiences of "queer" aging; the fascinating, yet often elided work of age activists; and, finally, the challenges posed by AI and, more generally, transhumanism in the context of caring for an ageing population. Divided into four parts: Part I: What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Part II: Aging: Old Age and Disability Part III: Aging, Old Age, and Activism Part IV: Old Age and Humanistic Approaches to Care the volume provides an innovative, two-part structure that facilitates rather than merely encourages interdisciplinary collaboration across the humanities and social sciences. Each essay is thus followed by two short critical responses from disciplinary viewpoints that diverge from that of the essay’s author. Drawing on work from across the humanities - philosophy, fine arts, religion, and literature, this book will be a useful supplemental text for courses on age studies, sociology and gerontology at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

Following criticisms of the traditionally polarized view of understanding suffering through either medicine or social justice, Lowe makes a compelling argument for how the medical humanities can help to go beyond the traditional biographical and epistemic breaks to see into the nature and properties of suffering and what is at stake. Lowe demonstrates through analysis of major healthcare workforce issues and incidence of burnout how key policies and practices influence healthcare education and experiences of both patients and health professionals. By including first person narratives from health professionals as a tool and resource, she illustrates how dominant ideas about the self enter practice as a refusal of suffering. Demonstrating the relationship between personal experience, theory and research, Lowe argues for a pedagogy of suffering that shows how the moral anguish implicit in suffering is an ethical response of the emergent self. This is an important read for all those interested in medical humanities, health professional education, person-centred care and the sociology of health and illness.

This book explores how person-centred health care could be refined to help persons alleviate pain-related distress and construct pain as a potentially positive experience. Rethinking Pain in Person-Centred Health Care is a fascinating contribution to the multidisciplinary literature on person-centred health care, pain and ethics.Traditionally, Western intellectual culture has downplayed the intuitive and emotional, promoting instead rational, natural-scientific perspectives. Applied to pain, an instrumental approach promotes the immediate and effective relief of pain, due to the widespread suffering and expense it can cause. However, different persons experience pain in different ways and Buetow moves beyond a commitment to eliminate pain to exploring how benefits of pain could include creating and managing meaning from pain. Rather than always looking to put pain behind them, persons may flourish by moving around pain, through pain, into pain and above pain. Buetow argues that this model depends on adopting a person-centred approach to health care, focusing less on the condition of pain and more on mobilizing the persons who present with, and manage, pain. This book will be of interest to professionals and academics/researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry who have a special interest in people with persistent pain conditions. It will also be an invaluable resource for physiotherapists, chronic pain consultants in secondary care and GPs.

This book critically analyses how politics and power affect the ways that medicine is taught and learned. Challenging society’s historic reluctance to connect the realm of politics to the realm of medicine, Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice: The Contradiction Cure emphasizes the need for medical students to engage with social justice issues, including global health crises resulting from the climate emergency, and the health implications of widening social inequality. Arguing for an increased focus on community-based learning, rather than acute care, this innovative text maps the territory of medicine’s contradictory engagement with politics as a springboard for creative curriculum design. It demonstrates why the socially disempowered - such as political and climate refugees, the homeless, or those without health insurance should be primary subjects of attention for medical students, while exploring how political engagement can be refined, sharp, cultivated and creative, engaging imagination and demanding innovationExploring how the medical humanities can promote engagement with politics to improve medical education, this book is a ground-breaking and inspiring contribution. It is an essential read for all those with a focus on medical education and medical humanities, as well as medical and healthcare students with an interest in the social determinants of health.

Primary care, grounded in the provision of continuous comprehensive person-centred care, is of paramount importance in the delivery of accessible and effective health care around the world. The central notion of person-centred care, however, relies on often-unexamined concepts of self, or understandings of what it means to be a person and an agent. This cutting-edge book explores contemporary pressures on the sense of self for both patient and health professional within a consultation and argues that building new concepts of the self is essential if we are to reinvigorate the central tenets of person-centred primary care.Contemporary trends such as shared decision-making between health professionals and patients and promoting self-management assume those involved are able to make their own decisions and take action. In practice, however, medicine often opts for reductionist perspectives of patients as passive mechanical systems and diseases as puzzles. At the same time, huge political and organisational changes mean time and resources are scarce, putting further pressure on consultations. This book discusses how we can start to resolve these tensions. The first part considers problems posed by the increasing bureaucratisation of primary care, the impact of information technology in the consultation, the effects of chronic disease on our sense of self and how an emphasis on biology over biography leads to over-diagnosis. The second part proposes solutions based on a strong ontology of consciousness, concepts of creative capacity, coherence and engagement, and will show how these can enhance the self-esteem of patients and doctors and benefit their therapeutic dialogue. Combining theoretical perspectives from philosophy, sociology and healthcare research with insights drawn from clinical practice, this edited volume is suitable for those researching and studying primary healthcare, communication and relationships in heal

In recent decades, both medical humanities and medical history have emerged as rich and varied sub-disciplines. Medicine, Health and the Arts is a collection of specially commissioned essays designed to bring together different approaches to these complex fields. Written by a selection of established and emerging scholars, this volume embraces a breadth and range of methodological approaches to highlight not only developments in well-established areas of debate, but also newly emerging areas of investigation, new methodological approaches to the medical humanities and the value of the humanities in medical education.Divided into five sections, this text begins by offering an overview and analysis of the British and North American context. It then addresses in-depth the historical and contemporary relationship between visual art, literature and writing, performance and music. There are three chapters on each art form, which consider how history can illuminate current challenges and potential future directions. Each section contains an introductory overview, addressing broad themes and methodological concerns; a case study of the impact of medicine, health and well-being on an art form; and a case study of the impact of that art form on medicine, health and wellbeing. The underlining theme of the book is that the relationship between medicine, health and the arts can only be understood by examining the reciprocal relationship and processes of exchange between them.This volume promises to be a welcome and refreshing addition to the developing field of medical humanities. Both informative and thought provoking, it will be important reading for students, academics and practitioners in the medical humanities and arts in health, as well as health professionals, and all scholars and practitioners interested in the questions and debates surrounding medicine, health and the arts.

This book provides a thought-provoking guide to conducting collaborative arts-based research. Focusing on ways that social inquiry might be conducted with marginalised groups to promote social justice, the text offers chapters on:Telling ‘alternative’ stories through a variety of methods from crafts to digital film Visual and metaphorical approaches to social research including photography, art and poetry Performative methods that include drama, dance, music and performance artFoster introduces relevant methodological debates, giving a context for understanding when arts-based research can be a fruitful approach to take and outlining a convincing rationale for using the arts as a way of understanding and representing the social world. The book also suggests a range of alternative criteria for evaluating the quality of arts-based research. Illustrative examples from around the world are used throughout the book and an extended case study is included that focuses on Foster’s own collaborative arts-based research. With their emphasis on the value of participative research and social justice, arts-based methodologies are becoming increasingly popular in health and social research. This is the ideal text for anyone looking to introduce arts-based methods into their research practice.

This book provides a thought-provoking guide to conducting collaborative arts-based research. Focusing on ways that social inquiry might be conducted with marginalised groups to promote social justice, the text offers chapters on: Telling ‘alternative’ stories through a variety of methods from crafts to digital film Visual and metaphorical approaches to social research including photography, art and poetry Performative methods that include drama, dance, music and performance artFoster introduces relevant methodological debates, giving a context for understanding when arts-based research can be a fruitful approach to take and outlining a convincing rationale for using the arts as a way of understanding and representing the social world. The book also suggests a range of alternative criteria for evaluating the quality of arts-based research. Illustrative examples from around the world are used throughout the book and an extended case study is included that focuses on Foster’s own collaborative arts-based research. With their emphasis on the value of participative research and social justice, arts-based methodologies are becoming increasingly popular in health and social research. This is the ideal text for anyone looking to introduce arts-based methods into their research practice.

The social position of learning disabled people has shifted rapidly over the last 20 years, from long-stay institutions, first into community homes and day centres, and now to a currently emerging goal of "ordinary lives" for individuals using person-centred support and personal budgets. These approaches promise to replace a century and a half of "scientific" pathological models based on expert assessment, and of the accompanying segregated social administration which determined how and where people led their lives, and who they were.This innovative volume explains how concepts of learning disability, intellectual disability and autism first came about, describes their more recent evolution in the formal disciplines of psychology, and shows the direct relevance of this historical knowledge to present and future policy, practice and research. Goodey argues that learning disability is not a historically stable category and different people are considered "learning disabled" as it changes over time. Using psychological and anthropological theory, he identifies the deeper lying pathology as "inclusion phobia", in which the tendency of human societies to establish an in-group and to assign out-groups reaches an extreme point. Thus the disability we call "intellectual" is a concept essential only to an era in which to be human is essentially to be deemed intelligent, autonomous and capable of rational choice.Interweaving the author's historical scholarship with his practice-based experience in the field, Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia challenges myths about the past as well as about present-day concepts, exposing both the historical continuities and the radical discontinuities in thinking about learning disability.

In Suffering Narratives of Older Adults, Mary Beth Quaranta Morrissey turns to the traditions of phenomenology, humanistic psychology and social work to provide an in-depth exploration of the deep structure of the suffering experience. She draws upon the notion of maternal holding to develop an original construct of maternal affordances – the ground of possibility for human development, agency and relational practices. The conceptual analysis is based on the life narratives of several elders receiving chronic care in facility environments. Creating new fields of communication for patients, their family members and health professionals in processes of reflection and shared decision making, this book builds on knowledge about suffering to help guide ethical action in preventing and relieving chronic pain and improving systems of care. It offers a phenomenological approach to understanding the maternal as a primary domain of moral experience in serious illness and suffering, and implications for policy, practice and research. A series of applied chapters, looking at individual experiences of suffering and care experiences, present critical areas of ethical inquiry, including: pain and suffering maternal relational ethics evaluation and moral deliberation about care options decision-making and moral agency end-of-life experiences of care. Exploring how an ecological relational perspective grounded in phenomenology may provide fruitful alternatives to traditional frameworks in bioethics, this is an important contribution to the ongoing development of an ecological ethic of care. It will be of interest to scholars and students of bioethics and phenomenological methods in the health and human services, as well as practitioners in the field.