The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London has put together a nice collection of interviews with four eminent neuroscientists, called Today’s Neuroscience, Tomorrow’s History, available as transcripts, videos or podcasts. The researchers profiled are Uta Frith, known for her research on autism spectrum disorders; Richard Gregory, who worked for many years …
An occasional compilation of freely available articles and posts on science, medicine, anthropology and society—broadly conceived. If you have suggestions please send an email to somatosphere at gmail dot com.
Writing about illness: At Bookforum Wendey Lesser reviews two memoirs about illness; The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso and A Journey Round my Skull by Frigyes Karinthy.…
This week’s issues of the two leading U.S. medical journals have prominent sections which fall under the “medicine and society” rubric.
The New England Journal of Medicine is running a series of articles on organ donation and the ethics surrounding the use of “cardiac death” — rather than “brain death” — as a criteria for determining the point of death. …
This was sent around the other day by Laurence Kirmayer on the Transcultural Psychiatry list-serv: a recent AP story recounts the efforts of several US states (namely, New Mexico, New Jersey and California) to mandate cultural competence training for clinicians.
I haven’t followed this closely, but there is an enormous amount of material available online for those interesting in …
I may be the last person to have heard about this, but I’m going to post it anyway. The other day a friend told me about an excellent series of podcasts on CBC Radio One’s Ideas program called How To Think About Science.
The series is basically a set of interviews with many of the leading philosophers, historians, anthropologists …
I came across this ad in a 1966 issue of JAMA. This isn’t at all my area of research, but I thought the ad was quite evocative of the changes that have occurred in psychiatry and mental health care over the past thirty years.
Because we now think of Ritalin as a drug used to curb hyperactivity or to focus …