The phrase 'medical humanities' has a currency that is wider than any agreement as to what it means, though those engaged in the field usually know what they are attempting. This volume examines the idea of 'symptom' as a route to understanding the structure of clinical practice. Actual symptoms are always experienced by real, actual individuals - however much those experiences are mediated by language, culture, expectation and the conventions of the clinical consultation. And this in turn...

An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the complex and conflicted topic of beauty in cultural, arts and medicine, looking back through the long cultural history of beauty, and asking whether it is possible to 'recover beauty'.

This open access book studies breath and breathing in literature and culture and provides crucial insights into the history of medicine, health and the emotions, the foundations of beliefs concerning body, spirit and world, the connections between breath and creativity and the phenomenology of breath and breathlessness. Contributions span the classical, medieval, early modern, Romantic, Victorian, modern and contemporary periods, drawing on medical writings, philosophy, theology and the vi...

This fourth volume in the Companion to Medical Humanities series contemplates the challenge of the prognosis, of looking ahead, wondering what will happen, and attempting to make sense of life and death.

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful, and examining how we can compare differing judgements of beauty when it is evident all around...

The Sunday Times Science Book of the Year, Anatomies by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, author of bestseller Periodic Tales, is a splendidly entertaining journey through the art, science, literature and history of the human body.'Magnificent, inspired. He writes like a latter-day Montaigne. Stimulating scientific hypotheses, bold philosophic theories, illuminating quotations and curious facts. I recommend it to all' Telegraph *****'Splendid, highly entert...

Narrative medicine has emerged in response to a commodified health care system that places corporate and bureaucratic concerns over the needs of the patient. Generated from a confluence of sources including humanities and medicine primary care medicine narratology and the study of doctor-patient relationships narrative medicine is medicine practiced with the competence to recognize absorb interpret and be moved by the stories of illness. By placing events in temporal order with beginnings ...

This delightful book presents a selection of D. W. Winnicott's best writing about children. The remarkable, enduring essays from Babies and Their Mothers and Talking to Parents are here combined with several hard-to-find gems of insight into the world of the child. Each piece was written for a wide audience of parents, childcare professionals, and teachers. In his empathic and witty way, Winnicott ranges over such timeless topics as the mother/infant relationship, trust, instilling a sense...

Why has the female voice deepened over the last fifty years? Who talks more, men or women? How can a baby in the womb distinguish between different voices?The human voice is the personal and social glue that binds us, and the most important sound in our lives. The moment we open our mouth we leak information about our biological, psychological and social status. Babies use it to establish emotional ties and acquire language, adults to decode mood and meaning in intimate and profess...

From one of the country's most eminent reviewers and academics, a delightfully sceptical and devastatingly intelligent assessment of the true value of art.

What is dreaming, and what causes it? Why are dreams so strange and why are they so hard to remember? Replacing dream mystique with modern dream science, J. Allan Hobson provides a new and increasingly complete picture of how dreaming is created by the brain. Focusing on dreaming to explain the mechanisms of sleep, this book explores how the new science of dreaming is affecting theories in psychoanalysis, and how it is helping our understanding of the causes of mental illness. J. Allan Hob...

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony? This Very Short Introduction explores comedy both as a literary genre, and as a range of non-literary phenomena, experiences and events. Matthew Bevis studies the classics of comic...