OTH Bookshelf: Film Studies

Posted on May 25, 2023May 30, 2023 by OTH

OTH Bookshelf: Film Studies

“Georgie, don’t you ever get tired of just reading about things?” – It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

This edition of OTH Bookshelf focuses on film studies. The list of more than 100 open access academic titles includes the book’s author or editor names, title and title remainder, year of publication, publisher, and open access format (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc.) Subject headings in the list are taken from WorldCat records or Library of Congress records, if available: if not, original cataloging of subject headings is provided in WorldCat format, for consistency. The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the book is given if it is available on the publisher’s website; if not, the URL is provided. The ISBNs listed are for the online version of the book if available, and if more than one online ISBN is available the ISBN for the PDF version has been preferred; if there is not an online or e-book ISBN, the ISBN featured on the publisher’s website is included. The book’s license type (Creative Commons, etc.), terms of use or copyright restrictions are included if these have been provided by the publisher.

If our readers are aware of any title or publishers that are not included, please feel free to submit them for consideration. (To be included in OTH Bookshelf, a book must be available to read online and/or download for free and must have been assigned an ISBN.) And we welcome your suggestions for topics that might be covered in a future issue of OTH Bookshelf.

Link to Google doc spreadsheet of titles:

Google Spreadsheet

Download Spreadsheet

Industry News: March 2023

Posted on March 14, 2023March 14, 2023 by OTH

In this month’s Industry News, women authors are outperforming the men at long last, a Seven Sisters College appoints its first Black women President, a profile of drag as an expanding cultural force, a major survey of what Covid-19 taught librarians, and Women’s History Month at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Women Authors in the Lead

In the 1960s women were the authors of just 18% of books published. By 2020, a new study has shown, that figure is more than 50%, for the first time in history. And it seems that the increasing number of female-authored books is good for the bottom line.

Source: Quartz

https://qz.com/women-are-now-publishing-more-books-than-men-and-its-go-1850177492

First Black Woman President for Mount Holyoke

Danielle Ren Holley is the first Black woman in the 186-year history of Mount Holyoke College to serve as permanent president, and the fourth Black woman in history to lead one of the original Seven Sisters Colleges.

Source: The Dig

https://thedig.howard.edu/all-stories/mount-holyoke-college-appoints-danielle-ren-holley-twentieth-president

A Profile of Drag

Drag has expanded into a cultural force for the public, appreciated by millions of individuals in mainstream audiences worldwide.

Source: Nexus Radio

https://nexus.radio/news/drag-through-time-drag-has-always-been-a-form-of-art

Women’s History at the Smithsonian

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will honor prominent Black women in the arts and entertainment industry throughout March in recognition of Women’s History Month.

Source: The Washington Informer

https://www.washingtoninformer.com/african-american-history-museum-to-mark-womens-history-month-by-spotlighting-notables-in-arts-entertainment/

What Covid-19 Taught Librarians

Three years after the shutdown of March 2020, American Libraries asked public, academic, school, and special librarians how the pandemic changed their work, what innovations and programs (curbside service, parking lot wi-fi, disinfecting collections, virtual programs, bookmobiles) are here to stay, and what they learned about their workplaces and users.

Source: American Libraries

https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2023/03/01/from-makeshift-to-mainstay/

Healing and Wellness Practices as Art

Posted on March 14, 2023 by OTH

by Megan Smith

In honor of Black and Women’s History Month, OTH is highlighting Ali Duncan and Urban Sanctuary Wellness Studio to illustrate the creative genius and legacy of Black women across the U.S.

Urban Sanctuary is a Black women-owned and led wellness studio in the historically Black neighborhood of Five Points in Denver, Colorado that used to be known as the ‘Harlem of the West.’ The studio is housed in a 120-year building and in 1915, the sons of the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, Louis, and Fredrick Douglass Jr., ran the Douglass Undertaking Company through the building. Ali Duncan, the founder, and visionary behind Urban Sanctuary, remains rooted in the building’s legacy through centering the QTBIPOC community at the studio by offering accessible pricing for classes and workshops, providing Anti-Racism education, and cultivating a safe space for the community to connect and heal.

Ali created a sanctuary full of possibilities. She allows creative freedom with the intention for all instructors, practitioners, creatives, musicians, and all beings that seek to utilize the studio for their healing, art, or educational offerings. The foundation of Urban Sanctuary is rooted in diversity and all walks of life are welcome to come as they are! The next time you are in Denver, Colorado, stop by the studio for yoga, meditation, dance, or aerial class!

Studio Schedule: https://app.arketa.co/usdenver

Articles on Ali Duncan the founder and visionary behind Urban Sanctuary.

https://www.yogajournal.com/teach/business-of-yoga/ali-duncan-denvers-first-black-woman-run-yoga-studio/

https://www.silkandsonder.com/blogs/news/how-i-thrive-urban-sanctuary-denver-founder-ali-duncan

https://milehimodern.com/the-voice-of-ali-duncan-of-urban-sanctuary/

PBS Interview:

https://www.pbs.org/video/urban-sanctuary-inclusive-yoga-wellness-studio-k11dju/

Women In the Old Library At Last

Posted on March 14, 2023 by OTH

OTH Talks to Helen Shenton, College Librarian at Trinity College Dublin

The Old Library at Trinity College Dublin is famous around the world as the home of the Book of Kells. It also houses 40 sculpture-busts of scholars and other luminaries like William Shakespeare. When it was decided to add sculptures of women scholars, the women now represented were selected from nominations by students, staff, and alumni.

The four women now represented in the Long Room are scientist Rosalind Franklin, folklorist, dramatist and Abbey Theatre founder Augusta Gregory, women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft and mathematician Ada Lovelace. The artists commissioned were Vera Klute, Guy Reid, Rowan Gillespie and Maudie Brady. The new sculptures are the first to be commissioned for the Long Room in the Old Library in more than a century. The ceremony of unveiling the new Trinity College sculptures took place on February 1, 2023, St. Brigid’s Day, a new public holiday. The first Irish public holiday named after a woman, St. Brigid’s Day acknowledges the unique role that women have played in Irish history, culture and society.

Oh, the Humanities! recently talked to Helen Shenton, Librarian and College Archivist at Trinity College Dublin, about the process of selecting the women scholars and the artists who created their sculpture busts. This interview has been slightly edited for clarity and length.

Clare Doyle (OTH): Tell me a little bit about the process of shortlisting the artists. Was it delayed by COVID and the lockdowns?

Helen Shenton (Trinity College Dublin): We shortlisted nine artists and we invited them to choose two of the women scholars and to create maquettes. We paid for the maquettes, which I think during COVD was particularly good, because, as you know, everyone was so concerned about the welfare of artists. So, no, it was a long process, but COVID didn’t really slow us down.

Clare: That’s great. And the nominations of the women scholars—that was a process where you reached out to staff and students and a broader community than just a small select committee?

Helen: We invited all nominations—we had hundreds of nominations—from anyone. And it wasn’t along the lines of who got the most votes or anything, We then had very robust discussions as to who should be chosen, and our one criteria is that we wanted two women from the arts and humanities, and two from the STEMs.

Clare: That’s great, yes—that struck me that you had a nice balance between women in their different fields. Was there any pushback from people who said, for instance, “Oh, these choices were great, but there should have been three out of the four women who were Irish”, or anything like that?

Helen: No, the criteria were really very broad. We didn’t say anything about nationality—it was women scholars who were deceased. That was all it was. And since we announced them, we haven’t had any pushback as such. People have said, “Oh, I championed so-and-so,” but no, there hasn’t been any pushback as to who we chose. Lady Gregory is the most connected with Ireland, but that wasn’t part of our criteria. We wanted international scholars.

Clare. That’s very interesting, and rather appropriate too, perhaps, for our post-COVID world.

Helen: And if you look at who all the male scholars [in the Library] are, everyone from Cicero to Swift to Hamilton, that’s very broad. We actively wanted to be broad.

Clare. Yes, interesting point, nobody ever said, “Oh, these men aren’t all Irish!” So, was there anyone that surprised you, from the nominations? “Oh, I’ve never heard of that woman before?”

Helen: Throughout the whole process, we all learned so much. There were names that I wasn’t particularly familiar with, and we discussed them, so I learned about those women. I’ve learned a huge amount about who these women were. We had an event the following day, the day after St. Brigid’s Day, a conversation between the four artists, and I had four Trinity scholars champion each of the women. Oh my Lord—they were so insightful—it was riveting. That will be online soon, we’re just editing the film of it. Again, everyone in the room learned something about the individual scholars. And it was fascinating coming at it from the point of view of our academics, who had been inspired personally and professionally, in their fields. But then the artists–I moderated it, and I was expecting them to talk about their response in terms of materials and technique, but they’d researched [the scholars] so much that they had become experts as well, and knew about times in their lives and how that reflected incidents in the artists’ own lives. The whole thing has just been a journey of learning and discovery.

Clare: Yes, I noticed when reading the article on your website that gave more details about each sculpture that each artist was tailoring their technique to the career and the personality of the woman. It was really interesting to get that insight into the techniques of sculptors, which you don’t always get.

Helen: Yes, and we’ve taken films of the artists in their studios, The artists were two women, two men—two Irish, two Continental European. We captured their creative process, which was really important, and they’ve talked about their choice of materials. All the previous sculptures were marble, some of them were Carrera marble, Two of the sculptors did choose marble, and one is lime wood, beautifully carved lime wood from the upper reaches of the Alps. And Rosalind Franklin’s is composed of different materials; there’s Parian, a type of porcelain, and there’s Jesmonite for her jacket, which is very textured, and then there’s Swarovski crystals for the necklace, and that’s a reference to the X-Ray crystallography that she used in her research that led to DNA. That actually contributed to her death, because she had been exposed to hundreds of hours of X-Ray crystallography, and it struck me, actually, that three out of the four women all died at 37 or 38.

Clare: That’s pretty startling, that three of the four were so young. It’s a great initiative. A little history–Am I correct in thinking that women as students were admitted into Trinity College at the beginning of the 20th century?

Helen: 1904, and that followed about 12 years of campaigning and petitions and so on, but it was 1904.

Clare: So a little over a hundred years. I haven’t tracked down a copy yet, but there is a book that focuses on the history of women in Trinity College, “Troublemakers” or something like that [The book is A Danger to the Men? A History of Women in Trinity College Dublin, 1904-2004, by Susan M. Parkes, Lilliput Press, 2004].

So it sounds as if a lot of work went into the campaign. Are there plans to add any more sculptures? The article mentioned bringing more diversity to the public spaces of Trinity College. Are there plans in general or specifically for the library?

Helen: I’ll address the library aspect of that if I may. It took quite a while and a lot of people and resources to pull off, and we wanted in particular—as you know, the Long Room is closing at the end of this year for major conservation. So I felt it was very important to get [the sculptures of the women] in beforehand. And with [the new public holiday] St Brigid’s Day, that became the obvious day to do the launch. So they’ll be in [the Library] for almost a year. Then our focus will be very much on this major, once-in-a-century conservation. I obviously aspire to getting more in there, but we’ll have to see how we go about doing that. But there’s definitely overall a desire to have more diversity, more representation of diversity in general across the campus. You probably know about the fabulous portrait of Mary Robinson [Chancellor from 1998-2019} that’s in the Dining Hall. That’s similar to the sculptures in some ways in that you don’t notice [the preponderance of male portraits] necessarily when you walk into these spaces, it’s not glaring, but when you get your eye in, you see this major difference. So that’s the direction we’re traveling in.

Clare: That’s great, thank you so much. I think our subscribers are going to find this very interesting, especially in the context of Women’s History Month but also with St. Patrick’s Day coming up.

OTH Bookshelf: Women’s History Month

Posted on March 14, 2023 by OTH

“I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists, HarperCollins (2014)

This issue of OTH Bookshelf focuses on women’s studies and women’s history. The list of nearly 300 open access academic titles includes the book’s author or editor names, title and title remainder, year of publication, publisher, and open access format (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc.) Subject headings in the list are taken from WorldCat records or Library of Congress records, if available: if not, original cataloging of subject headings is provided in WorldCat format, for consistency. The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the book is given if it is available on the publisher’s website; if not, the URL is provided. The ISBNs listed are for the online version of the book if available, and if more than one online ISBN is available the ISBN for the PDF version has been preferred; if there is not an online or e-book ISBN, the ISBN featured on the publisher’s website is included. The book’s license type (Creative Commons, etc.), terms of use or copyright restrictions are included if these have been provided by the publisher.

If our readers are aware of any title or publishers that are not included, please feel free to submit them for consideration. (To be included in OTH Bookshelf, a book must be available to read online and/or download for free and must have been assigned an ISBN. And we welcome your suggestions for topics that might be covered in a future issue of OTH Bookshelf.

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Humanities Interventions for Health Equity

Posted on March 14, 2023March 14, 2023 by OTH

by Sarah L. Berry, PhD

In April 2021, the CDC officially declared racism a public health threat. What does this mean, how did we get to this point, and how do the humanities offer ways to address this problem?

Racism is not part of US history; rather, it is US history. The 1619 project shows that the economic, political, legal, and social structures of the US were founded upon race-based slavery and colonialism. Inequity melded into national structure has a downstream effect on health for all citizens, but impacts BIPOC people disproportionately.

According to the CDC’s statement on Racism and Health, centuries of race-based policies and practices “affecting where one lives, learns, works, worships and plays” created inequities in access to housing, education, wealth, and employment. “These conditions—often referred to as social determinants of health—are key drivers of health inequities within communities of color, placing those within these populations at greater risk for poor health outcomes.” Health inequities affect every dimension of daily life, including explicit and implicit bias in healthcare settings; access to care, physically, socially, and linguistically; trust in the medical profession; the health effects of internalized racism; exposure to race-based violence; somatic and behavioral responses to chronic experiences of racism and discrimination; and intergenerational, inheritable health effects of historical and personally-experienced racism.

Understanding the complex relations between race and health through a structural inequity framework highlights race as a social construction that has embodied and experienced consequences rather than as a biochemical (genetic) characteristic inherent to individuals or groups. We are still contending with inequities and harms resulting from the historical construction of race as a “natural,” medicalized category that explains health, illness, and care disparities.

Yet precisely because race is a social concept with consequences lived by individual people who are part of communities, the humanities offer a way to address race as a public health threat with deep historical roots, to gather perspectives from people living in diverse communities, to identify community assets, and to imagine and build an equitable future for all. Health humanities offers us materials and methods for thinking critically about health and race, contextualizing data and patterns, learning from multiple perspectives, and productively dialoguing.

First, a note on dialogue about challenging subjects like racism: it’s important to recognize that everyone brings different life experiences with them, and that these experiences as well as peoples’ identities will affect how they are able to receive and how they perceive the content. Respect for different identities or ways of being in the world is paramount. Equally important are promotion of self-care and holding space for all individuals in group settings. A guide to nonviolent communication and discussion practices is here.

Here are three starting points for dialogue and collective action for communities and organizations working to address inequity from the ground up. The text below and linked material contain content about racism and racialized experiences that may distress some readers.

I. Into the Past: Inventing Racialized Bodies

Today’s federal categories of race, which medicine and population health research adopt, descend from Enlightenment taxonomies and colonial politics. In Who’s Black and Why, scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran republish essays from 1739 that pinpoint imperial definitions of blackness in scientific terms. Such constructions served the interests of a global chattel slavery industry and profitable cash crops produced by enslaved labor. Poor health and illness caused by the conditions of enslavement were attributed to individuals and groups by means of biased measurement that was repeated and seemed to serve as empirical evidence. What is the enduring effect of this racist bias in health science? Consider the use of scientific measurements of blood oxygenation in enslaved people in Samuel Cartwright’s medical article (1851) and the development of an enduring medical technology, the spirometer, which continues to be calibrated differently according to race, according to scholar Lundy Braun in Breathing Race into the Machine (2021). This has serious therapeutic consequences.

Critical thinking about historical patterns also enables us to ask counterpoint questions. Were there any alternative or even antiracist ideas about the causes of health disparities? Survivors of enslavement wrote about their illnesses as conditions caused by inadequate basic needs and healthcare, violence, and stress, like Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs (1861). In 1906, Harvard-trained sociologist W.E.B. DuBois researched social determinants of health to oppose the dominant theory of somatic “inferiority” of Black Americans.

Historical inquiry contextualizes current health disparities, and also provides precedents for antiracist responses to them.

II. Current Perspectives on Race and Health

Literature invites people to consider health, illness, and the social factors impacting them to gain new perspectives outside their own worldview. Rhetorical analysis also asks us to pay attention to who is speaking, on what occasion, to whom, and for what purpose. Critical race theory in literary studies is a rigorous method of structural analysis that, in part, privileges the perspectives of people of color who have been silenced and marginalized in print and public discourse. It prioritizes individual and community points of view to counter the dehumanization of describing health through statistics alone (see, for example, ethicist Keisha Ray, “Going Beyond the Data” [2021]). Overall, storytelling enables people to speak and listen with attention to the social identities that permeate everyone’s health and illness, and creates a forum for personal and shared testimonies.

Racism has of course affected not only enslaved people of African descent, but also immigrant and indigenous communities. Here are three texts with prompts for discussion on specific health issues and their intricate relationship to racial identity:

The short story “Stars” by Ye Chun details the experience of Luyao’s stroke and aphasia as a new mother and new American; how does this story call out anti-Asian bias in US treatment regimens? How does the story affirm Luyao’s therapeutic inventiveness and make a case for person-centered, linguistically-consonant care?

In her memoir The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, Lori Arviso Alvord, the first Navajo woman surgeon, narrates her navigation of structural barriers to access education and medical education outside her reservation home, which is a legacy of colonial oppression of indigenous peoples. How does her perspective on Navajo health change when she returns to her home community to treat people with biomedical methods? How do Navajo concepts of community and social practices enable Dr. Alvord to innovate surgical outcomes to benefit all patients?

In “Greens,” a personal nonfiction essay, Kiese Laymon describes his own eating disorder and the addictions of his family members in Mississippi. He uses the second person “you,” to address his narrative to his mother. In an interview, he describes using this technique to intentionally speak to vulnerable Black people. How does this essay highlight the theme of physical and behavioral responses to racism? What points are asserted through its rhetorical structure in terms of whose health story is being told, to whom, and for what purpose(s)?

Finally, taken together, what do these three narratives suggest about health issues and/or assets among diverse US communities?

III. Envisioning Equitable Futures

Critical thinking about racialized experiences of health in the past and present enable us to imagine an equitable future for all. Science fiction abounds with dystopias that paint a bleak picture of the future, which often amplify acute present problems. The film Black Box (2020, dir. Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour) dramatizes a mother’s abuse of futuristic biotechnology in Black male bodies in response to losing her son. Chang-Rae Lee’s speculative novel On Such a Full Sea (2014) projects a future in which Chinese refugees of environmental toxicity produce consumer luxuries in a depopulated US city for wealthy gated communities hoarding medical treatments while rural areas must rely on veterinarians for human healthcare; see Phillip Barrish’s essay “Speculative Fiction and the Political Economy of Healthcare” (2019) for an argument about the power of the humanities to enable structural analysis of health inequity.

Dystopian fiction extrapolates the consequences of existing social inequity in order to urge reform. But speculative fiction also creates space for the ethical imagination of societies that have eliminated disparities and that structurally support health and wellbeing for all. Speculative world-building and constructing alternative realities can inform productive dialogue and collective action. Afrofuturism in particular reimagines the past, present, and future as a survival tactic. For example, in Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, scholar Esther L. Jones shows that the fiction of Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okrafor and Nalo Hopkinson “authoriz[e] black womanist methods and strategies of healing in hostile environments while at the same time imagining new ethical norms” that extend to all vulnerable people (147). According to Walidah Imarisha, an editor of the anthology of speculative tales by activists Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.”

The humanities play an essential role in dismantling structural inequity and addressing race-based health disparities. For more projects on health humanities as public health initiatives, see Translational Humanities for Public Health.

Health Humanities: An Anti-Racist Response to the Hidden Curriculum in Medical Education

Posted on January 25, 2023 by OTH

by Craig M. Klugman

Craig M. Klugman, Ph.D. is Vincent de Paul Professor of Bioethics & Health Humanities at DePaul University in Chicago.

Medicine has a race problem.

Many people have heard of the health disparities that affect people of color in the United States: They are less likely to have a primary care physician (KFF), less likely to have health insurance coverage (Branch and Conway), and suffer from higher rates of illness and death (Hill et al.).

Fewer people know that this problem also manifests in health care workers. First, there are fewer health care professionals of color than there should be based on their percentage of the U.S. population (Sullivan Commission). This means that a patient from a minority community is less likely to have a physician or a nurse who looks like them or shares their background. Second, a recent study shows that racial health inequities in the U.S. health care system during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic led to increased burnout and moral distress in all health care providers, no matter their race (Buchbinder et al.).

Historically, Black patients were often denied care at hospitals, and real estate redlining meant that they likely lived (and continue to live) in medical deserts. Add in fewer economic opportunities as well as fewer educational opportunities and Black patients have had less access to being able to pay for medical care.

Advances in medical knowledge often used Black patients as research subjects, seldom with their knowledge or consent. In the mid-1800s, James Marion Sims, the father of obstetrics and gynecology, developed surgical techniques on enslaved Black woman with neither their consent nor anesthesia (Lynch; Spettel and White). During the 40 years of the Tuskegee Syphilis Trials (1932-1972), 600 Black men were studied to observe the progression of their disease. However, health care professionals and researchers never informed the men of their disease nor how to protect their partners and the men were told that research tests were “treatment”. Once penicillin (the cure) was available, study personnel prevented the men from getting access. This history and many more examples created distrust of the medical community that has lasted until today.

While modern medical school curriculums teach students to respect all patients and to treat people according to their needs not by the color of the skin, racial inequities in medical care persist. In addition to the social determinants of health touched upon above, another factor may be “The Hidden Curriculum” (Hafferty and Franks). This is the material that is not listed in the syllabus, does not appear in the textbook and will not be on the exam. The hidden curriculum is the behaviors, attitudes, and implicit biases that students absorb from their faculty through their training.

Much of the didactic (classroom learning) years of medical education take place in lecture halls and labs where students learn from textbooks and case studies. Studies show that medical textbooks feature predominantly white bodies (Ighodaro et al.). Thus, students learn to diagnose and treat diseases as they appear in people with lighter skin but not in people with darker skin. For example, cancer on white skin is often quite noticeable, but on Black skin, less so. The result is that skin cancers in Black patients are diagnosed later when the disease is at a more advanced stage, harder to treat, and correspondingly, survival rates are lower (Brady et al.). The case studies that form the background of students developing clinical thinking skills traditionally featured patients who are male, white, cis, heterosexual, and able-bodied (Plataforma SINC).

When a student moves into the second phase of medical school where they work with patients in clinics and hospitals, they quickly learn to emulate their physician-mentors who model skills, tool, and behaviors that are sometimes derived from historic racism. These clinical preceptors also grade the students who quickly learn to repeat what they are shown—often without explanation, history, or evidence—and not to question (Klugman). Thus, the system perpetuates biased stereotypes to the next generation of health professionals. For example, the long-used algorithm to estimate kidney function unfairly penalized Black patients because the calculations are based on a convenient lie about the physical musculature of Black bodies. The result is that Black patients are less likely to be placed on the transplant list (Neal and Morse). In another study, subjects (including medical personnel) expressed a belief that Black patients felt less pain, a lie rooted in the horrors of slavery. The result is that some doctors undertreat pain in their Black patients today (Hoffman et al.).

One potential avenue for training physicians and other health care workers to practice anti-racist medicine is through health humanities. This field employs the methods of the humanities and arts to explore the experience of human illness and wellness. By having health professions students learn close reading, metaphor analysis, observation skills, communication skills, historical analysis and more, they can become more aware of the structural racism that people experience in everyday life and in the medical system (Banner).

The tools of the humanities teach students to identify presumptions and biases that are embedded in the practice of medicine, challenging them, and then changing them (Crear-Perry et al.). For example, at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, medical students created an art exhibit using QR codes placed around campus that encouraged people to learn more about the history of racism in medicine and its effect on the health of populations of color (Keenan). Graphic medicine can use comics (visual images + text) to shine light on injustice in medicine. In one comic, the artists graphically explain the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the generational health costs of its legacy (Taylor and Kindred).

Many schools take students to museums where they learn observation skills through looking at images of art, a method to help them see what is in front of them and move beyond stereotypes they may bring when seeing patients (Balhara and Irvin; Klugman et al.; Klugman and Beckmann-Mendez). Learning improvisational theater techniques can help clinicians communicate better with patients and to understand patient perspectives (Fessell et al.). Forum theater is a method where the audience interacts with the actors and the story on the stage. This experience can help students to see race and racism as experienced by their patients and peers (Manzi et al.). Fiction writing asks students to write about the life and health care experiences of a person different than themselves, helping them up to understand living with health challenges and navigating the medical system (Saffran). In Experiential Race Testimonies, students study health disparity statistics and then learn the stories of real patients whose lives are encapsulated in that data, putting a human face on the numbers (Ray). These examples are a few of many that have been introduced to medical education.

To use the humanities most effectively in anti-racist health education, one must read stories, watch films, and view art that are created by people of color and that take people of color as the central subject. The works should focus on how race, gender, disability, religious minorities, and sexual orientation “inform social, political, economic, and institutional structures, which then inform health and illness” (Banner). The health humanities can help students to learn to identify racist structures and practices, to bring the hidden into the light, to dismantle these discriminatory beliefs, and to be physicians and other health care professionals that work to bend the arc toward justice.

This approach can lead to writing new case study narratives that feature a diverse cast of characters representing the wide range of patients to whom medical students will someday provide care, a step that some medical schools have undertaken (Sufian et al.). As for that kidney algorithm? In January 2023, a revised model was adopted that removes the racist assumptions (Organ Procurement & Transplantation Network). We also need to entice more students of color into the health care professions. Some effective methods have included removing standardized testing (which can have biased origins and questions), providing minority scholarships, mentoring, and role modeling.

Perhaps most importantly, engaging in health humanities teaches students empathy—an ability to imagine what another person might be experiencing as well as sensing the emotions of another (Graham et al.). When working with patients who are different from the health care provider, empathy allows the imagination to see them as suffering human beings in need of care, deserving of compassion, and demanding respect. The result will be better health outcomes for patients, more inclusive medicine, and healthier healers.

REFERENCES

Balhara, K. S. and N. Irvin. “”The Guts to Really Look at It”-Medicine and Race in Robert Colescott’s Emergency Room.” JAMA, vol. 325, no. 2, 2021, pp. 113-15, Medline, doi:10.1001/jama.2020.20888.

Banner, Olivia. “Structural Racism and Practices of Reading in the Medical Humanities.” Literature and Medicine, vol. 34, no. 1, 2016, pp. 25-52, doi:10.1353/lm.2016.0001.

Brady, J. et al. “Racial Disparities in Patients with Melanoma: A Multivariate Survival Analysis.” Clin Cosmet Investig Dermatol, vol. 14, 2021, pp. 547-50, PubMed-not-MEDLINE, doi:10.2147/CCID.S311694.

Branch, Breauna and Douglas Conway. “Health Insurance Coverage by Race and Hispanic Origin: 2021.” US Department of Commerce US Census Bureau, 2022. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/acs/acsbr-012.pdf January 20, 2023.

Buchbinder, Mara et al. “Hospital Physicians’ Perspectives on Occupational Stress During Covid-19: A Qualitative Analysis from Two Us Cities.” Journal of General Internal Medicine, vol. 38, 2023, pp. 176-84, doi:10.1007/s11606-022-07848-z.

Crear-Perry, Joia et al. “Moving Towards Anti-Racist Praxis in Medicine.” The Lancet, vol. 396, 2020, pp. 451-53, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31543-9.

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Paint the White House Black

Posted on January 24, 2023 by OTH

by Gregory Carr

Colors don’t clash, people just do/Color me happy next to you/Aww, just like it should, there goes the Neighborhood/That is what they’d have us believe/Paint the White House black, brown/Paint the White House…/Paint the White House black, brown/Paint the White House, black…

– GEORGE CLINTON, “Paint the White House Black,” (1993)

The Reconstruction Era indelibly changed American politics. From 1865 until 1875, Blacks became U.S. senators and U.S. representatives from the South during the Reconstruction Era and obtained male suffrage through the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment, only to be thwarted by the terroristic activities of the Ku Klux Klan at the polls, Rutherford B. Hayes’ Compromise of 1877, and the implementation of Jim Crow laws. Many people thought before Barack Obama’s unlikely candidacy in 2008 that a Black man becoming president would be practically impossible, given this country’s racialized history and hostility towards Black participation in the political process and Black political leadership.

This phenomenon did not go unnoticed in Hollywood. D.W. Griffith was the first filmmaker to seize upon the fear of Black leadership with his propagandistic film Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith’s paean to the nobility of the Confederate “Lost Cause” narrative lionized the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and conquerors, while simultaneously demonizing Blacks as shiftless, indolent, violent, and unfit for political office. Hollywood would not challenge Griffith’s cinematic white supremacist ideology until 57 years later with a film featuring America’s first Black president. Hollywood films that feature Black presidents as central figures tend to demonstrate a high level of implicit bias in determining Black men’s fitness to lead while simultaneously perpetuating the “doomsday” trope. The films Idiocracy (2006), The Man (1972), and Deep Impact (1998), foreshadow three fearful apocalyptic themes in the American political psyche: the culmination of white patriarchal rule during a national crisis, the end of moral consciousness in leadership, which leads to the cessation of physical existence.

The culmination of white patriarchal rule has often been used as a rationale for excluding Blacks from elected offices such as the presidency. Hillary Clinton in the now infamous “3 AM” ad questioned whether Obama would know what to do in an international military crisis and if the America people could trust him with their children’s safety. This political tactic is also evidenced in the satirical film Idiocracy. Dwayne Elizondo “Mountain Dew” Herbert Camacho seems to embody this persona of absolute buffoonery. Set 500 years into the future, the film laments the absence of intellectualism in politics. Camacho, a former porn star and wrestler is the president and faces a series of crises such as food insecurity, a drought, and an unstable economy. Private Joe Bauers, a young white military librarian who wakes up in 2505 after a failed cryogenic experiment, solves the incompetent Camacho’s national problems, becomes a national hero, and then becomes president in his place. Camacho’s presidency has been intellectual ruin for the country, which ultimately is rescued by the ubiquitous Hollywood white savior in the form of Bauers. Although this pre-dates the Obama presidency by two years, the aforementioned attacks on Obama’s intellectual capacity to lead now seem prescient in light of the film. Tambay Obenson argues, “The message apparently was only morons would put a Black man in the White House.”

To demonstrate how pervasive this attack on Obama’s intellect was, Ta-Nehisi Coates asserts:

“From the “inadequate black male” diatribe of the Hillary Clinton supporter
Harriet Christian in 2008, to Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant on CNBC against
subsidizing “losers’ mortgages,” to Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!”
outburst during Obama’s September 2009 address to Congress, to John
Boehner’s screaming “Hell no!” on the House floor about Obamacare in
2010, politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama.”

The prevailing assumption with these generalizations was that a Black man could not be entrusted to be the leader of the free world in the same way a Black man previously could not be a quarterback in the NFL – they just simply lacked the leadership skills that only a white man could provide as president – regardless of their ability or inability.

In addition to the culmination of white patriarchal rule, films featuring Black presidents seem to paint a picture of a lack of moral fortitude. Black men’s moral fortitude has often been questioned historically. Although he only received less than 2,000 votes in 1904, George Edwin Taylor ran for president on the National Negro Liberty Party ticket. Was his low vote count because white constituents thought he was of low moral character? Was it because of the many negative connotations of blackness? After Emancipation, Black men were labeled stereotypically as “lazy,” “dangerous,” or “violent.” Noted Swedish scientist Carl von Linnaeus in his classification of the races in his seminal work “Sistema Naturae” classified those of the African race as “‘niger, phlegmaticus, laxus” (“black, phlegmatic, lax’”). With this negative idea of Black men embedded within the American consciousness, Taylor’s status as an outlier may have made him a liability; however, Taylor’s presence may have also frightened some white voters who believed the stereotypes about Black men’s immoral character through the media, myths, and oral family histories. In film The Man, Douglas Dilman becomes the president through succession as a result of the assassination of the President and the Speaker of the House, the refusal of the Vice-President to assume the office because of health challenges, and the Secretary of State, who rightfully bestow the office upon him because he was President Pro Tempore of the Senate. Stanton’s wife ridicules him for not seizing the power away from Dilman and declare himself President. Eaton agrees to assist Dilman, but only to be the “power behind the throne” who will micromanage Dilman as President. Dilman initially goes along with the scheme but begins to develop confidence in his own abilities to lead the country as president. By the end of the movie, he challenges Eaton for the party nomination and vows to become the first Black President of the United States. This scenario mirrors Obama’s 2008 campaign, in which his then Democratic rival and future Vice-President Joe Biden clumsily stated: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” Biden later stated that his comments were taken out of context, but they are clearly racist and demeaning at their core. Translation: “articulate,” (for a Black guy), and “bright and clean,” (acceptable to whites). These dog whistles signal that Obama, like Dilman was more of the exception to the rule rather the than the norm for Black leaders.

Ultimately, a Black president who lacked the intellectual capacity to make crucial decisions during a national crisis and lacked the moral fortitude to inspire and motivate his people who lead to the worst-case scenario – the end of our physical existence. Since we’re all going to die, we need someone to comfort us in those waning hours. And who better to ease our discomfort than a Black President? President Tom Beck of Deep Impact played by Morgan Freeman gives us a sympathetic ear to face our trials. In the end, he’s powerless to save us from the impending disaster of the doomsday meteorite, but he can make us comfortable with our eventual demise: “Hello, America. It is my unhappy duty to report to you that the Messiah has failed.” The presumption is that if it was the end of the world, a Black president would be acceptable because he would be subservient to his traumatized white constituency – an homage to the self-sacrificing, Integrationist Hero films of Sidney Poitier during the turbulent 1960s.

Although we’re now in a Post-Obama Presidency, hopefully we can see how the racist vitriol and disrespect fueled a toxic Trump Campaign and Presidency. He was the chief architect of the so-called “Birther Movement,” which presupposed that Obama was not an American citizen, was born in Kenya, and therefore should be disqualified as President. These frivolous conspiracy theories along with many other dangerous ones are now a part of mainstream politics. Election Deniers are now viable candidates for statewide and federal offices, and democracy itself is now in peril. The burning question still remains: did Obama paint the White House black? A little – but only time (and perhaps future Hollywood Black Presidents) will tell.

Bibliography

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Fear of a Black President.” The Atlantic. September 2012 Issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/

“A Dubious Compliment.” Time Magazine. January 31, 2007.http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1895156_1894977_1644536,00.html

Judge, Mike, dir. Idiocracy, 2006; Austin, TX: 20th Century Fox.

Justice, John. “11 Movies with Black Presidents to Help You Escape Donald Trump’s Inauguration.” BET.com. January 19, 2017. https://www.bet.com/article/5mrv3g/11-movies-to-watch-to-escape-trump-s-inauguration

Leder, Mimi, dir. Deep Impact, 1998; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures.

Obenson, Tambay. “Presidents Day Poll: Best Black Presidents on Film; 7 Candidates on the Ballot; Cast Your Votes!” IndieWire. February 15, 2016.

Rönnbäck, Klas. “The Idle and the Industrious – European Ideas about the African Work Ethic in Precolonial West Africa.” History in Africa 41 (2014): 117–45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26362086.

Sargent, Joseph, dir. The Man, 1972; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures.

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Weeks, Linton. “A Forgotten Presidential Candidate from 1904.” NPR.org. December 1, 2015. https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/12/01/455267676/a-forgotten-presidential-candidate-from-1904

COMMENTARY: The Science of Can and Can’t

Posted on January 24, 2023 by OTH

by Alissa Simon

The laws of physics appear straightforward. From elementary school on, we learn of their lasting permanence. However, as theoretical physicist Chiara Marletto points out in her recent book The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey Through Counterfactuals, they are far from perfect. She notes that we do not totally understand the nature of some of these laws, but also that these laws have been tested, and in some cases, replaced by theories of relativity. She writes,

“There are no absolute sources of certain truth: any good solution to a problem may also contain some errors. This principle is based on fallibilism, a pillar of [Karl] Popper’s explanation of rational thinking. Fallibilism makes progress feasible because it allows for further criticism to occur in the future, even when at present we seem to be content with whatever solution we have found. It leaves space for creating ever-improving theories, stories, works of art, and music; it also tells us that errors are extremely interesting things to look for. Whenever we try to make progress, we should hope to find more of them, as fast as possible.” (16)

In other words, if we believe in progress, then we must believe in the fallibility of our best theories. Reading this book at times felt heretical, so strong was my grip on the laws of physics. (Please note that I am not a scientist, and so I have a high school vocabulary for much of this discussion.) Yet, Marletto’s words inspired me as no other recent non-fiction has. She asks us to think for ourselves and question our preconceived notions – even those seemingly permanent ones that we learned in school along the way.

Reading this book inspired questions about humanity’s relationship to progress. Can humans sustain a mindset of perpetual unknowns? Marletto says that we should hope to find errors as quickly as possible, and I agree, but I also wonder what the human threshold for change might be. Constant questions challenge, and often annoy, us. Is that because of the way that we are taught about education and knowledge? Do we have misconceptions about the meaning of knowledge? We enter elementary school with a creative genius which colors the world any way we like. In primary grades, we are taught to look, explore, and question. However, snapshots of higher education show students taking notes, dictation, and tasked with memorization. This style of education may solidify the notion that knowledge is eternal. Marletto continues:

“Any conjectured explanation which seems to be working may be found to be false at any time. As I said, this happened with Newton’s theory of gravitation when it was superseded by quantum theory and general relativity. We can never know whether a physical theory that we have formulated is true; all we can say is that it has so far not been found to be false. This may seem a little unsettling, but it is an extremely interesting fact about how knowledge is created; and, as I said, it is central to the possibility of making progress, via criticism.” (24)

This challenges my notions of knowledge, which previously felt monolithic, substantial, and solid. Marletto’s definition of knowledge is flexible, elastic, and tenuous. She accepts fallibility as a necessary feature of knowledge, which means that it is always subject to improvement and change. I sat with this notion for some time, and even re-read the end of her book while doing so because her words are extremely valuable and profound. Maybe I alone crowned knowledge king, in which case, I will work to unseat it from its throne. Rather than memorizing facts (which may or may not be useful depending on your discipline), I have the ability to become a better student. Open curiosity is a very valuable trait in lifelong learning. And yet, so is knowledge. There is a tension here in the way that I want knowledge to be certain and steadfast, but also flexible.

Marletto’s book incorporates literary analysis as a way to show how knowledge is a journey. This marvelous blend of disciplines breeds pathways to insight and carves the path for future science research, a path unmired from historical cement. Marletto asks us to create, to be creative readers, to evolve. She writes, “What matters is whether, along the journey, the character has or has not managed to create more knowledge while preserving his or her own individual capacity to create new knowledge. So an ending can be a fertile starting point; it depends on whether the character reaching the end is still capable of being creative. In fact, a successful nostos [return] does not have an ending. Its ending is the starting point of new adventures.” (225) Rather than accepting an end with finality, she claims that we have power to change and adapt, to find new questions and reassess our initial questions. Investigations become better as they gain data.

I admit, this new way of thinking may not be new to everyone. Yet, more often than not, as educators, we assume our role is to instruct and form, to pass on knowledge of a firmer sort. What I would rather see in the classroom, however, is the ability to pass on questions. Demonstrate failure (a failed experiment or theory or manuscript, or what have you) as a step in the path towards success. What parts of our existing world have we not yet investigated? Where do our theories fail? Revitalizing questions will revitalize creativity, something that Marletto deems extremely important. She says, “Creativity is one of the main tools we have to form stuff that can last. If one is interested in making the good outcomes of our civilisation last and improve, then understanding how creativity is nurtured – both at the individual and at the societal levels – is essential.” (220) Fostering exploration will help students identify their own innate curiosity.

I realize that this might cause stress for both educators and students. Constant challenge will unseat all stability. Questions that seem long resolved can be revisited, sometimes with fruitless efforts. All of this comes at the cost of time, so it is important that students select specialties based upon interests. Passion will drive questions with an energy that might overcome all other roadblocks. There is more to be done with regards to knowledge and its source. There is also more to be done with creativity. These two seemingly divergent topics are inherently related as I discovered partially due to Marletto’s excellent text.

By mixing disciplines Marletto grants new eyes to old questions. More importantly, she inspires curiosity and demands us to undo some of our preexisting knowledge….a Herculean, and quasi-antiscientific effort. It makes me wonder why we believe – so strongly – that what we know is correct? I admire the courage of this book because it is creative, multi-disciplinary, and insightful. Moreover, Marletto explains complex scientific notions in ways that are accessible to the layperson. She invites all of us, regardless of degree or discipline, to join the journey.

INTERVIEW: Dr. Kimberly Myers

Posted on January 24, 2023January 25, 2023 by OTH

Oh, the Humanities (OTH) recently conducted a Q and A session with Dr. Kimberly Myers. Dr. Kimberly R. Myers. Dr. Meyers is Professor of Humanities and Medicine and Distinguished Educator at Penn State College of Medicine, where she designed and co-directs Observation & Interpretation, a required course in art museum-based education for first-year medical students, and where she founded and hosts the Penn State Health Physician Writers Group, the group being a way for doctors to pursue creative writing for publication in medical journals. Dr. Myers also created with photographer Wendy Palmer the 2015 exhibition Edges of Light: Images of Breast Transformation with photographer Wendy Palmer which has toured the U.S. Her publications include the books Breast Cancer Inside Out: Bodies, Biographies & Beliefs (Peter Lang, 2021); Graphic Medicine Manifesto (Penn State University Press, 2015, co-authored with MK Czerwiec, Ian Williams, Susan Merrill Squier, Michael J. Green and Scott T. Smith), Clinical Ethics: A Graphic Medicine Casebook (Penn State University Press, 2022, co-authored with Molly Osborne, Charlotte Wu, and illustrated by Zoe Schein), and Illness in the Academy (Purdue University Press, 2007).

Clare (OTH): Dr. Myers, I had the pleasure of attending a recent talk that you gave at Trinity College, Dublin on graphic medicine. Your presentation’s theme was, briefly, that the medium of comics can enhance the training and practice of healthcare providers and can be an important source of information and support for patients and caregivers contending with illness. There was some very cogent feedback from the audience. What was the most unexpected question or response from the session — or something else that stood out to you about the event?

Dr. Myers: Thanks, Clare, for reaching out with these questions. What stood out most for me was that we had such a lively discussion from both sides of the Atlantic—even though here in the U.S., where we’re five to eight hours behind you in Ireland, we began before breakfast! Our meeting was a fine example of the ways graphic medicine—that is, issues of health, illness, and wellbeing conveyed in the form of comics—can so easily open up discussion among people from all walks of life. Comics is a great ice-breaker. One reason for its effectiveness is likely subconscious—that is, comics aren’t threatening because they are associated with childhood. People who view a comic typically assume they’ll “get it.” There’s no pressure to sound erudite when commenting on it and there’s no test to follow, so they feel free to offer their thoughts about what’s going on in the panels. Further, comics is a democratic medium in that it has the capacity to engage people no matter their understanding of a particular language or their cultural contexts. Pictures and words work together to create understanding and/or questions, and it usually feels natural to invite other people to share our responses when we talk about comics. When we gathered at Trinity, it was interesting to see the plentiful comments in chat that continued throughout our entire spoken discussion.

OTH: In your essay in Graphic Medicine Manifesto (2015) you talk about coming to appreciate comics later than some of your co-contributors—as a child who was a voracious reader you preferred biography and “proper” fiction. Have you encountered a prejudice against adults reading comics amongst doctors and other members of the medical community?

Dr. Myers: As learned professionals, whatever our professions, we probably all initially carry some unconscious bias against comics as a “serious” medium. There’s actually a debate within the graphic medicine community whether we should call what we do “graphic medicine” or “comics.” For some GM folk, the former term lends legitimacy to our work that might otherwise be dismissed as juvenile. Inasmuch comics could seem lightweight to some, it’s wonderful to engage in discussion of a medically-themed comic and witness that skepticism evolve, somewhat magically, into surprise and then conviction that we’re onto something with this comics thing. That’s one of the pleasures of working in this field: it’s just plain fun to experience how comics work as an art form in its own right and also as a catalyst for social engagement.

To be sure, though, creating comics and readings comics are also very demanding work, as we have to attend to multiple dimensions simultaneously. Just to give you brief insight into the complexity of this process, here’s an overview of how our team created each of the eight comics that comprise Clinical Ethics: A Graphic Medicine Casebook. We created the narrative arc, the essence of what would happen within the story. This includes the kind of characters we wanted (e.g., gender, race, socio-economic status, etc.) and the fine points of the ethical dilemma we were featuring. We consulted with ethics experts to double-check our own training and practice, with patients and caregivers, and with lay readers, including students (our targeted audience) to gauge how effectively we were conveying information and inspiring questions that would lead to invested discussion. The drawing of the comics themselves included a story board, pencil sketches, basic ink drawings, edits, and final inking . . . and there were multiple revisions between each stage of this process. In the verbal sphere, we had to make language concise enough for comics while also ensuring adequate detail and precision to convey the complexity of any situation requiring deliberation multiple stakeholders in the medical-ethics situation we were depicting. It took several months to move each 6- to 8-page comic from idea to publishable art.

OTH: Some academic librarians have had success using unconventional methods in reaching “nontraditional” learners—for instance, Central Methodist University in Missouri has used Pinterest as a library marketing and information literacy tool. Library staff created boards from images of books and videos and found that this form of social media “lends itself very well to sharing information to visual leaners and traditionalists alike.” Are medical comics also suitable for visual learners, and what are some other cohorts who might also find them helpful?

Dr. Myers: Yes, medical-themed comics are quite useful for visual learners as well as non-native speakers, low-literacy patients and younger people. It’s important, however, to distinguish between graphic medicine and illustrated guides, for instance pictures showing how to use an inhaler for asthma. Graphic medicine is also different from medical illustrations like those one would find in an anatomy textbook and from visual depictions of bioscientific processes like diagrams of neural pathways. Graphic medicine is more expansive and complex than these other genres, not in terms of the knowledge and talent needed to create or understand them, but in terms of their scope. Graphic medicine artifacts attend simultaneously to structural, biological, psychological, and social dimensions (to name a few) of an illness experience.

OTH: Let’s talk about another visual medium. When talking about the 2015 exhibition Edges of Light that you created using photos of you by Wendy Palmer and reflective text by yourself, you say that after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer, the decision to meet with a photographer and document your pre-surgery body was taken very early on. Why choose photography as a medium and not, for instance, a comics-style illustration?

Dr. Myers: The short answer, Clare, is that the original motivation for the exhibit was purely personal. Like many women, I wondered how my body would look after mastectomy, and I wondered if, at some point in the future, I might want to remember what my body looked like “before.” I had only a week between diagnosis and my first surgery (lumpectomy), and I acted on that impulse very quickly because I didn’t have time to deliberate. It was only later, after chemotherapy, mastectomy, and surgical reconstruction, that I revisited the photographs that Wendy had taken. We were struck by how many different emotions she had captured, and we thought that other women might find some community—even solace—in seeing someone else’s journey of physical transformation. That’s when we narrowed the 400+ unposed photos to the 30+ photos that constitute the actual exhibit (part of which is reproduced in Breast Cancer Inside Out). After we chose the photos, I wrote the brief verbal reflections, recalling what I was feeling in that moment. I could do this easily because of the remarkable nuance Wendy had captured on film.

OTH: In your book Breast Cancer Inside Out, you bring together essays from patients, practitioners involved in breast cancer treatment, and academics from the health humanities field.

The aim of the project, as you say in the introduction, is to move towards an inclusive health humanities account of breast cancer, one which gives voice to those with lived experience. As an educator, do you feel that the stories of breast cancer patients have particular resonance for the field of medical humanities? And as someone with her own experience of this disease, do you hope that patients who are living with or have lived with breast cancer will read this book?

Dr. Myers: I’ll tackle your second question first. I do hope that people living with breast cancer—the patients and also the family, friends, and healthcare professionals who care for them—find the book meaningful and helpful. I created this particular book because it was what I needed and wanted when I was diagnosed but couldn’t find all in one place: various components of diagnosis and treatment; insights from people who shared my illness; personal perspectives from doctors, nurses, therapists, and other professionals who care for those with breast cancer; wider contexts of scientific, historical, cultural, academic, and artistic significance. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison once said, “If there’s a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Breast Cancer Inside Out is the book I wish I’d had.

I think stories about all illness experiences are valuable, integral in fact, to medical humanities because we’re meaning-making creatures and we make meaning through the stories we tell and those we hear. One thing I discovered with my first book, Illness in the Academy, is that people who have experienced breast cancer have a need and a desire to write and otherwise tell their stories. If I were a medical anthropologist, I would conduct a study on why breast cancer pathographies are so popular and seemingly much more plentiful than first-person accounts of other illness experiences. My conjecture is that it has to do with the fact that the disease affects mostly women. I’m not an essentialist with regard to gender, but I do think women tend to form communities around deeply personal struggles perhaps more often than men do. Sharing stories about breast cancer can certainly be a bonding experience, one that women might imagine men could not as fully, if at all, understand. Whether the impulse grows out of a community or serves to create a community, I believe many people have a desire to help others who are faced with the trauma of a potentially life-threatening illness. Stories in the form of first-person reflections, photographs, comics, visual and other artifacts can create virtual support groups.

OTH, thanks very much for providing an opportunity to think about what I do from different angles.