Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Dr Brandy Schillace about medicine and its engagement with the humanities. This episode explores how the humanities engage and reflect critically upon the practices of health, as well as shape conversation and lead the way for social justice and change. Brandy also discusses the new global initiatives launched by BMJ’s Medical Humanities.

Dr. Brandy Schillace (skil-AH-chay) is a critically acclaimed author, historian, and editor in chief of BMJ’s Medical Humanities Journal. Her recent book, Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher – described by the New York Times as a “macabre delight” – explores Cold War medicine, bioethics, and transplant science. Dr. Schillace’s next book, The Intermediaries, will tell the forgotten, daring history of the interwar Institute of Sexology in Berlin: trans activists, the first gender affirming surgeries, and the fight for LGBTQ rights in the shadow of the Nazi Third Reich. She writes regularly for WIRED, Scientific American, Globe and Mail, WSJ Books, and Medium. Her YouTube series, Peculiar Book Club, features livestreamed chats with bestselling authors of unusual nonfiction, from Lindsey Fitzharris and Mary Roach to Carl Zimmer and Deborah Blum. Dr. Schillace has appeared on Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum, NPR’s Here and Now, and the History Channel. 

Co-hosts Ian Sabroe and Dieter Declercq talk with Karla and Bill on the topic of death and dying. This episode explores the complex terrain of race and gender at the intersection of literature, law and bioethics, alongside clinical perspectives on the transformative power of bereavement and the social benefits of funeral ceremonies.

Professor Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Emerita Professor of English, African-American Studies, and Professor of Law at Duke University. She’s the author of Passed On: African American Mourning Stories. Her classrooms and scholarship focused on literature, law, and bioethics. She has been a member of the Advisory Bioethics Board of the Greenwall Scholars Bioethics Fellowship and served as a national and international speaker on matters of Black Cultural Studies. Karla FC Holloway’s most recent novel, Gone Missing in Harlem (Triquarterly, 2021) was awarded a Publisher’s Weekly Starred ⭐️ Review (!) and joined her Harlem Renaissance series that began with A Death in Harlem (2019). Her 3rd novel, The Thursday Lady, is nearing completion.

Dr. William G. (Bill) Hoy is Clinical Professor of Medical Humanities at Baylor. He is an experienced hospice/palliative care counselor with more than 35 years of experience caring for the dying and bereaved. Dr. Hoy is widely regarded as an authority on the role of social support in death, dying and grief and his experience includes more than 20 years leading bereavement and pastoral care programs in hospice care. Though primarily a bedside clinician, Dr. Hoy has authored more than 125 articles and book chapters as well as six books, including Do Funerals Matter? (Routledge, 2013), Bereavement Groups and the Role of Social Support (Routledge, 2016) and Finding Meaning in Funerals (Routledge, expected 2024).

Ian and Dieter talk with Dr Chisomo Kalinga and Dr Carla Tsampiras about the growth of Medical and Health Humanities Africa (MHHA). Adopting an intersectional perspective, Chisomo and Carla discuss many exciting projects and initiatives focused on the south of the continent.

Dr Chisomo Kalinga is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Her work approaches literary and medical narratives from a transdisciplinary approach using both aesthetic interpretation and ethnography. Her research interests are disease (specifically sexually transmitted infections), illness and wellbeing, biomedicine, traditional healing and witchcraft and their narrative representation in African oral and print literatures. She is currently supporting efforts to promote the Malawi Medical Humanities Network (MMHN), an interdisciplinary network for Malawiana researchers, and the Medical and Health Humanities Network Africa (South Africa) to share events, programmes, projects and exhibitions that explore the links between health and the humanities.

Dr Carla Tsampiras is a senior lecturer in Medical and Health Humanities (MHH) in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is a social historian of health interested in the relationships between narratives and ideas about gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality, and health (individual and planetary). She has written on the early years of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa; gender violence and slavery in the Cape colony; MHH in health sciences education and the development of the field of MHH in the region. Her current research work is concerned with flesh foods (meat), gender, power, and violence. She is a member of the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS), sits on the Environmental Humanities South working group, is a board member of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham, and is a founding member of the Medical and Health Humanities Africa network.

Ian and Dieter talk with Prof Miranda Fricker and Prof Havi Carel about epistemic injustice, harms in health contexts, and the connections that philosophical thinking has with literature and art.

Miranda Fricker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research is primarily in Ethics and Social Epistemology with a special interest in virtue and feminist perspectives. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007); co-author and editor of Reading Ethics: Selected texts with interactive commentary (2009); and co-editor of a number of collections, the most recent of which is The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology (2019). She was Director of the Mind Association from 2010-2015; Assistant Editor of the Journal of the APA from 2014-2020; and since 2015 has served as Moral Philosopher on the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government-appointed body of expert advisers that considers claims concerning loss of cultural property during the Nazi era. She is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This year she was elected President of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) 2022-23.

Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where she also teaches medical students. In 2020 she completed a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, leading a five-year project, the Life of Breath. She was awarded the Health Humanities’ Inspiration Award 2018 for her work on the project. Havi won the IJPS 2021 PERITIA Prize for her paper ‘When Institutional Opacity Meets Individual Vulnerability: Institutional Testimonial Injustice’ (co-authored with Ian Kidd), published in International Journal of Philosophical Studies. Her third monograph was published by Oxford University Press in 2016, entitled Phenomenology of Illness. Havi was voted by students as a ‘Best of Bristol’ lecturer in 2016. Havi is the author of Illness (2008, 2013, 2018), shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006). She is the co-editor of Health, Illness and Disease (2012) and of What Philosophy Is (2004). She uses film in teaching and has co-edited a volume entitled New Takes in Film-Philosophy (2010). She also co-edited a special issue of Philosophy on ‘Human Experience and Nature’ (2013). She previously published on the embodied experience of illness, epistemic injustice in healthcare, vulnerability, wellbeing within illness, transformative experience, death, and on the experience of respiratory illness in the Lancet, BMJ, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Applied Philosophy, and in edited collections.

Ian and Dieter talk with Dr Ian Williams and Dr Muna Al-Jawad about graphic medicine and explore the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare. 

Dr Ian Williams is a comics artist, writer and doctor who lives in Brighton. His graphic novel, The Bad Doctor, was published in 2014 and followed up in 2019 by The Lady Doctor. Both were critically acclaimed and he is working on his third, for the same publishers, provisionally entitled The Sick Doctor, which will be published in 2022.

Dr Muna Al-Jawad is a consultant geriatrician and senior lecturer in medical education in Brighton. In 2010 she started drawing comics as part of a masters in clinical education, and her superhero alter-ego “Old Person Whisperer” was born. She uses comics in her practice as a medical teacher and in her research. She does and supervises comics-based research into various areas of practitioner and student experience.

Click here to find out more about Graphic Medicine.

Click here to see some of Muna’s work.

Ian and Dieter talk with Prof Angela Woods (Durham University) about moving from Australia to the UK to develop her research in medical humanities, and about how the field has grown and changed over the last 10 years. They also discuss some of the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration and about what we can do to identify and address barriers to the further evolution of the medical and health humanities, especially for early career researchers.

Angela Woods is Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, and since 2012 has been Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, an ambitious interdisciplinary research project on the experience of hearing voices. Her research focuses on experiences and frameworks for understanding psychosis and voice-hearing, and on 'critical concepts’ within the medical humanities. Angela is the founding editor of The Polyphony and a series editor of Bloomsbury’s Critical Interventions in the Medical and Humanities series, as well as a former Associate Editor of the BMJ’s Medical Humanities Journal.