Medical
Humanities
In 2012 my colleague Professor Jo Winning and I created and taught our Master’s degree in Applied Medical Humanities at Birkbeck College for the first time. We focus on a practice-based approach (including a placement in another speciality or medical tradition) that enables medical practitioners to explore their everyday clinical contexts through insights from the humanities, to improve both patient care and self-care.
Click below, if you’re curious about the programme
Both Jo and I are Council members of the Association for Medical Humanities, an international learned body dedicated to the development of the medical and health humanities, welcomes members from a broad range of disciplines and practices within medicine, healthcare, the arts and humanities:
The papers in this selection reflect a range of areas of my work in postgraduate medical education, medical humanities, and LGBTI issues.
CLICK ON EACH ITEM TO READ THE TEXT
Postgraduate
Medical
Education
After the inappropriate disciplining and suspension of Dr Hadiz Bawa-Gharba in 2018, new guidance was issued to trainee doctors that the thoughts they recorded in their reflective portfolios (kept as a formal part assessment) could be used in court. This paper addresses that crisis.
Encouraging Results? During their postgraduate medical education, doctors learn to manage the complexity, uncertainty, and breadth of clinical decision-making in their everyday, real-life practice. This kind of education has much more in common with what is known as ‘radical’, ‘critical’, or ‘emancipatory’ education than it does with instructional training, and one of the key philosophers and practitioners in that area is A S Neill, founder of the world-famous Summerhill School. When the schools’ regulation body Ofsted threatened Summerhill with closure because its approach was different from the mainstream, I was one of many educationists who came to their defence.
Conference speaking is always great fun: you never know what interesting questions the audience might raise. This conference paper was for the South-West Postgraduate Medical Deanery’s annual conference in 2012.
As both an alumnus and a former member of staff at the University of Warwick, I was delighted to support and develop this innovative use of Samuel Beckett’s work to explore issues affecting people experiencing chronic or acute decline of brain functioning and the work of those who support them.
A Festschrift for Professor Dame Barbara Clayton: Dame Barbara chaired the Standing Council for Postgraduate Medical and Dental Education [SCOPME] for many years. In the 1990s, SCOPME brought together stakeholders to develop and innovate new educational practices in areas such as multiprofessional working and learning, assessment and appraisal, and improving practice-based teaching. I contributed to their work and was honoured to be asked to speak at the celebration of Dame Barbara’s life in 2011.
Medical
Humanities
As a Visiting Professor at the University of Cumbria, I support my colleague Dr Lisa Fenton in teaching her ground-breaking, first-in-the-field Master’s degree in Bushcraft. Lisa is a very senior survival expert and Bushcraft professional, who ran her own company for seventeen years before writing her PhD: I teach some specialist theoretical aspects of her programme and was delighted to collaborate with Lisa and our colleague Professor Heather Prince, to produce this article.
One of the Masters’ degrees we ran in my department was in Leadership in Clinical Settings, and I was frequently nettled by government’s urging the NHS to ‘toughen up’ in order ‘to survive’. Noticing how the popular genre of ‘survival television’ gave support to that demand, I try here to bring that discourse to the surface and expose its fallacy when applied to the care of vulnerable people.
The Association for Medical Humanities has always been a fertile location for discussing new ideas, and in this paper I am developing the conceptual relationship between military and commercial colonialism and the abjection of LGBTi people.
I carried out my research into what happens when Western biomedicine meets traditional indigenous medicine in Canada’s Yukon Territory, where the hospital at Whitehorse provides a model of good practice in foregrounding traditional healthcare needs for Yukon First Nations people. This paper is one of the results of the generous help given to me by my Yukon friends, both indigenous and settled.
LGBTI Issues
The fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partially decriminalised gay men, provided an occasion for an early presentation of the hidden case of Ewan Forbes.
This piece was commissioned by the journal Child and Adolescent Mental Health and focuses on the horrific case of David Reimer and on the adolescent girl we know only as ‘Agnes’.
I include this as a historical document marking a turning point when UK trans community groups made a collaborative statement of the respect and health care they expected from the NHS. I was privileged to coordinate the document and to present it at a conference organised by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
I’m not a great letter-writer but an invitation from the British Medical Journal provided an opportunity to summarise the history and inequality of NHS treatment of trans people.