A Journal of Medical Humanities
Mariella ScerriVictor Grech Malta While I was as busy as anyoneon the sunny plain of life, I heardof you laid aside in the shadowyrecess where our sunshine ofhope and joy could neverpenetrate to you.– Harriet Martineau1 Literary works can illustrate the loneliness and social isolation experienced by people when they are sick.2 The chasm between health…
Milad MattaGregory RuteckiLyndhurst, Ohio, United States “. . . phthisic beauty[’s] . . . most famous operatic embodiment was Violetta Valery . . .This physical type became not only fashionable but sexy . . . When a society does not understand—and cannot control—a disease, ground seems to open up for mythologizing . . . it.”1…
Jamie SamsonDublin, Ireland “Everyone who is born,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor, “holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”1 While the passport denoting health and vigor might get us through customs most of the time, we eventually reach that unwelcome day when it is…
Columba QuigleyLondon, United Kingdom The episode occurred some few years ago, when I was working in palliative medicine, caring for those with advanced and often incurable disease. As I walked onto the ward early one morning, a woman whom I had been seeing on a daily basis for symptom control started screaming at me. Only…