Humanities resources to support healthcare professionals and patients
Dealing with death, Miguel Torga Coimbra, 10 December 1958 Twenty-five years now that I’ve been battling death professionally, and I feel more incapable than ever of understanding and accepting it. Halfway between the peasant in the pure state and pure intellect, when death comes calling I find neither the peace of the credulous person who Read More …
Use of Penicillin in 1945, Miguel Torga Coimbra, 1 February 1945 Penicillin. I too want to try out the last panacea invented by science. On a young boy burning up with fever, pus running out of his ears and terrible pain. In the old days, the tympanic membrane would be doused with milk from a Read More …
I was as fearful of failing as I had been with my A-levels, but there was also a terrible sense of unease about what was happening to me, to which I couldn’t put a name. As I prepared for my finals, with my mind map, and my chart of each available hour, there came a Read More …
Joy of chaperones. Posy Simmonds. Commentary We are advised to use a chaperone almost always. A perceptive observer, Simmonds puts her finger on the lack of trust implied, and its effect on both parties. Further info Cartoon reproduced by kind permission of the author GMC on chaperones Medical defence associations, royal colleges, and medical schools Read More …
The false narrative of choice. S Luckett G. ‘Miss,’ she said, as I bit my tongue. I was choking on the worst insult a female junior doctor can bear, ‘I know that crystal meth is really my problem. I’m going to quit the meth.’ ‘Love,’ I started, a reflex term of endearment for the wretched Read More …
A rural doctor is shown after a late night operation in which he had failed to save the life of a pregnant woman and her baby. Every few years Eugene Smith’s classic Life magazine photostory is uncovered again. See the full article with high resolution photos (Time Magazine). Commentary This extraordinary historic record, beautifully captured, Read More …
Storyhealing, by Gavin Francis. The weight of clinical practice can be overwhelming for some – that’s why more doctors in the West are working part-time and retiring earlier than ever before. But the profession’s very multiplicity offers insights and inspirations, satisfactions and consolations, available in few other others. I’m now 20 years into my medical Read More …
Forty-eight days ago I qualified ‘with distinction’; but distinction is one thing and hernia is another. Once I watched a professor operating on a strangulated hernia. He did it, while I sat in the amphitheatre. Suppose they bring me a hernia? Worse, they brought a dreadfully injured young girl, only daughter of a devastated widower. Read More …