Teaching humanities in UK medical schools: towards community-building and coherence
May 2025
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Journal article
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Monash Bioethics Review
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Medical humanities teaching in UK medical schools has lacked cohesion, having developed opportunistically in different locations. Cohesion is necessary to develop an identifiable community of practice, but within that community there can be multiple readings of what ‘medical humanities’ are and how they may develop. This article details discussions held by medical humanities scholars teaching in UK medical schools at a workshop in January 2025 at the University of Oxford covering five key areas: the role of humanities scholars in medical schools, patients as partners in medical education, core curriculum teaching, intercalated teaching, and assessment. Our discussion highlights opportunities and challenges facing humanities teaching in UK medical schools today and calls for the creation of a community of medical humanities scholars working in UK medical education embracing diversity of opinion and practices. The article is specifically written as a synopsis of a brainstorming symposium.</jats:p>
“Abdominal Surgery.” Oxford Bibliographies in "History of Medicine". Ed. Jacalyn Duffin. New York: Oxford University Press, April 2025. URL.
April 2025
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Journal article
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Oxford Bibliographies
Infecting minds: socio-contextual drivers of vaccine perceptions and attitudes among young and older adults living in urban and rural areas in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
March 2025
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Journal article
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BMC Public Health
Background: We investigated how social and contextual factors, including a pandemic, shape vaccine perceptions and attitudes among people living in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. We assessed how participants’ views, acceptance, and uptake of vaccines for a range of infectious diseases, may be influenced by experiences and events linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: We conducted 30 in-depth face-to-face and telephonic interviews with participants living in diverse rural and urban communities in two districts within KwaZulu-Natal. Participants were adults (≥ 18 years) consisting of ordinary citizens, traditional healers, and nurses. We combined non-representative convenience, snowballing and purposeful sampling techniques to recruit participants. Data collection was conducted in IsiZulu, and we used both inductive and deductive thematic analysis approaches to identify key themes linked to participants’ perceptions and attitudes towards vaccines. Findings: Our study participants were mostly those who had accepted vaccination. The main reasons given for vaccine uptake included understanding the importance of vaccines for disease prevention and survival, and securing the health of family members, the fear of death, government campaigns, vaccine mandates and penalties. Older participants (≥ 40 years) demonstrated more positive attitudes towards vaccines. Most participants downplayed the role of culture and religion in attitudes towards vaccines. However, some of the drivers of vaccine hesitancy were having an ancestral calling, medical pluralism, or local myths around the treatment of infections such as influenza and mumps, and a perceived depopulation agenda couched in mistrust and the use of incentives and penalties to force people to accept COVID-19 vaccines. Conclusion: Exploring what shapes attitudes towards vaccines in communities provides opportunities to understand the reasoning behind how people make decisions about whether to take a vaccine in different geographical and cultural spaces. The exploration of contexts, exposures and circumstances provide insights into perceptions and behaviour. Deeper engagement with local communities is crucial to develop evidence that can inform vaccine interventions. Assumptions about how culture and religion affect vaccine hesitancy or acceptance should be avoided in the process of developing such evidence.
South Africa, Public engagement, Vaccine hesitancy, Medical pluralism, COVID-19, Vaccine confidence
Diphtheria and the risk of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in low-resource settings
February 2025
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Journal article
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Academia Medicine
This study aims to highlight the complex and multifaceted nature of vaccination drivers, uptake, and hesitancy in the face of the recent outbreak of diphtheria in Nigeria and its significant impact on the regional and global burden of disease. The outbreak has highlighted the continuing threat and vulnerability of vaccine-preventable disease (VPD) outbreaks or epidemics due to the low vaccine uptake in the country and across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This study first identifies recent drivers and challenges to vaccine uptake. It then promotes the need for regionally based, interdisciplinary approaches with a focus on visual communication strategies, particularly in low-literacy settings. Ultimately, visual communication strategies would benefit from a broader evidence base to better understand the effectiveness and impact of design in promoting vaccine uptake. The study recommends that in the Nigerian context, addressing the threat of VPD outbreaks should be embedded in communication strategies, especially when they are designed considering the local population. This should occur alongside strategies to reduce psychological impact factors like stress associated with travel time for vaccination and waiting time at healthcare facilities. Vaccination programs should be linked to local sources of safety or individuals with high credibility to increase trust; healthcare workers should stop exaggerating the effectiveness of vaccines to stimulate demand; and fathers should be considered an important target group in intervention programs.
Death and the doctor: the museum as a tool for understanding the needs of the dying
October 2024
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Journal article
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University Museums and Collections Journal
Over the past several years, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has been part of a multi- disciplinary team examining the question of how we train medical students to deal with those parts of their profession which are concerned primarily with the humanity of their patients. In collaboration with colleagues from Neuroscience, Psychiatry, History and Theology, the Museum has participated in an ongoing teaching experiment in which medical history, ethics and the visual arts are brought to bear on an understanding of medical professionalism - what it means to be a doctor and how to be a better one. Bringing together museum professionals, Expert Patient Tutors and doctors in curriculum planning and delivery, the work has been delivered online, using images from the museum’s collections, and live, using the Ashmolean galleries as spaces for the consideration of issues around death, dying and end-of-life
care. This article and its preface reflect broadly on a decade of medical collaboration at the Ashmolean and specifically on the processes of both making and delivering teaching on dealing with death, in a cross-disciplinary, non-medical context, asking not only what the Museum can do for medical education but why medical education needs the museum.
medical humanities, collections-based teaching, neuroscience, medical education, psychiatry, object-based learning, object-based teaching
Pandemic preparedness: why humanities and social sciences matter
August 2024
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Journal article
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Frontiers in Public Health
<p>Whilst many lessons were learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing reflection is needed to develop and maintain preparedness for future outbreaks. Within the field of infectious disease and public health there remain silos and hierarchies in interdisciplinary work, with the risk that humanities and social sciences remain on the epistemological peripheries. However, these disciplines offer insights, expertise and tools that contribute to understanding responses to disease and uptake of interventions for prevention and treatment. In this Perspective, using examples from our own cross-disciplinary research and engagement programme on vaccine hesitancy in South Africa and the United Kingdom (UK), we propose closer integration of expertise, research and methods from humanities and social sciences into pandemic preparedness.</p>
Caesarean section: the history of a controversial operation
May 2024
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Journal article
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Lancet
Pandemic Preparedness: Why Humanities and Social Sciences Matter
January 2024
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Journal article
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Frontiers in Public Health
Beyond Thomas Wakley: invisible actors and hidden voices in The Lancet during the 19th century
October 2023
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Journal article
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Lancet
In 1893 The Lancet published an editorial reflecting on the legacy of its first Editor, Thomas Wakley, who led the journal from its inception in 1823 to his death in 1862. The Lancet was, the article proclaimed, “the ‘incarnation’ of Thomas Wakley”. In the years after Wakley's death, this version of The Lancet's history cemented and stuck. His name remains integral to the journal to this day, as in the annual Wakley Prize. The Lancet's mission to expose medical corruption was inextricably linked with Wakley's own political inclinations, and he is justly lauded for his pioneering role in socially driven medical journalism. But even in its earliest days The Lancet was never a solo effort. Just as the journal's content provides historical insight into health services and systems, so its own structures have a history to be explored.
The Lancet: an archive of surgical history
October 2023
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Journal article
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Lancet
From the first days of The Lancet 200 years ago, surgery has had a central role in its existence. The journal has acted as a nerve centre, linking surgical innovation by individuals with challenge and debate in the wider profession. Such innovation shapes and is shaped by the social and political context of its time. Looking back over two centuries, the journal's many research articles, letters, and commentaries relating to surgery provide an invaluable insight that goes far beyond specific discoveries or breakthroughs.
Infecting Minds: Perceptions and attitudes towards vaccines among rural and urban dwellers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
January 2023
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preprint
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Research Square
32 Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, 4203 Health Services and Systems, 3202 Clinical Sciences, 42 Health Sciences, 44 Human Society, Infectious Diseases, Coronaviruses, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Prevention, Coronaviruses Vaccines, Health Disparities, Coronaviruses Disparities and At-Risk Populations, Biotechnology, Clinical Research, Social Determinants of Health, Immunization, Vaccine Related, 3.4 Vaccines, Infection
Beyond ‘born not made’: challenging character, emotions and professionalism in undergraduate medical education
May 2022
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Journal article
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Medical Humanities
In this article we explore the historical antecedents and ongoing perpetuation of the idea that medical professionals must adhere to a specific ‘character’. In the late nineteenth century, an ideal of the medical student as ‘born not made’ was substantiated through medical school opening addresses and other medical literature. An understanding prevailed that students would have a natural inclination that would suit them to medical work, which was predicated on class structures. As we move into the twentieth-century context, we see that such underpinnings remained, even if the idea of ‘character’ becomes ‘characteristics’. This was articulated through emerging psychological and sociological perspectives on education, as well as medical school admission processes. The significance ascribed to character and characteristics-based suitability continues to exclude and limits who can access medical careers. In the final part of the article, we argue that a framework of uncertainty can and should be mobilised to re-evaluate the role of doctors’ education and critique long-standing notions of professional identity, via the integration of medical humanities and clearer professionalism teaching within medical curricula.
‘“A Borderland in Ethics”: medical journals, the public and the medical profession in nineteenth-century Britain
March 2020
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Chapter
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Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: How they Constructed Communities
SBTMR
The medical press and its public
February 2020
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Chapter
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The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900
Mind-boggling medical history: Creating a medical history game for nurses
May 2019
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Journal article
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Science Museum Group Journal
Reading medicine and health in periodicals
October 2018
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Journal article
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Media History
This special issue of Media History, arising from a workshop on nineteenth-century medical and health periodicals, aims to explore both the contemporary significance and readership of these periodicals, but also how their study has been approached by historians. We discuss existing work on medical periodicals—considering how these publications have been studied by literary and historical scholars—and how our understanding and use of them has developed in an era of digitisation. Finally, we examine how the contributors to this volume each highlight important issues in terms of the interpretation, reading, and materiality of medical and health periodicals.
reading, medicine, periodicals, nineteenth century, digitisation
Belly-rippers, surgical innovation and the ovariotomy controversy
September 2018
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Book
This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, while also remaining at the boundaries of ethical acceptability. This book traces the operation’s innovation, from its roots in eighteenth-century pathology, through the denouncement of those who performed it as ‘belly-rippers’, to its rapid uptake in the 1880s, when ovariotomists were accused of over-operating. Throughout the century, the operation was never a hair’s breadth from controversy.
science
Opening the abdomen: The expansion of surgery
January 2018
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Chapter
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The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery
Defining difference: competing forms of ovarian surgery in the nineteenth century
May 2017
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Chapter
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Technological Change in Modern Surgery: Historical Perspectives on Innovation
SBTMR
Data for the ‘Diagnosis London’ project
January 2017
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Dataset
Through the Zooniverse platform, volunteers will highlight issues of health and welfare as they relate to work, food, housing and pollution and sanitation. The result will be a large, robust dataset that will enrich the history of London’s health and which will be of interest to social, local and family historians, epidemiologists, and anyone else with an interest in the topic. The project will be launched in 2017 and will be available via the project website at www.conscicom.org/projects and on Zooniverse at https://www.zooniverse.org Project data will be uploaded to this record upon project completion. Diagnosis London is a collaboration between the Zooniverse, the Wellcome Library and the Constructing Scientific Communities project. The project asks citizen historians to tag information from the Medical Officer of Health Reports of London (recently digitised by the Wellcome Library) which were published between 1848 and 1972.
Honour and subsistence: invention, credit and surgery in the nineteenth century
November 2016
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Journal article
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British Journal for the History of Science
The origins of contemporary exclusion of surgical methods from patenting lie in the complexities of managing credit claims in operative surgery, recognized in the nineteenth century. While surgical methods were not deemed patentable, surgeons were nevertheless embedded within patent culture. In an atmosphere of heightened awareness about the importance of ‘inventors’, how surgeons should be recognized and rewarded for their inventions was an important question. I examine an episode during the 1840s which seemed to concretize the inapplicability of patents to surgical practice, before looking at alternatives to patenting, used by surgeons to gain social and financial credit for inventions.
John Wickham’s new surgery: ‘Minimally invasive therapy’, innovation, and approaches to medical practice in twentieth-century Britain
October 2016
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Journal article
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Social History of Medicine
The term ‘minimally invasive’ was coined in 1986 to describe a range of procedures that involved making very small incisions or no incision at all for diseases traditionally treated by open surgery. We examine this major shift in British medical practice as a means of probing the nature of surgical innovation in the twentieth century. We first consider how concerns regarding surgical invasiveness had long been present in surgery, before examining how changing notions of post-operative care formed a foundation for change. We then go on to focus on a professional network involved in the promotion of minimally invasive therapy led by the urologist John Wickham. The minimally invasive movement, we contend, brought into focus tensions between surgical innovation and the evidence-based model of medical practice. Premised upon professional collaborations beyond surgery and a re-positioning of the patient role, we show how the movement elucidated changing notions of surgical authority.
The Debris of Life: Diseased Ovaries in Eighteenth-Century Medicine
November 2015
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Chapter
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The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century
The definitive collection on eighteenth-century generation and its many milieus, The Secrets of Generation will be an essential resource for studying this topic for years to come.
The usual story of medicine in the past couple of centuries is one of growing professionalisation, and increasing distance between patients and practitioners. But is a new era of public participation in medicine upon us? Clinicians and patients are moving towards shared decision making in many areas, whilst some medical journals now invite patients to take part in peer review. Citizen Science projects, such as Cell Slider run by Cancer Research UK and Zooniverse, have enabled the public to contribute to medical research. Such developments open up new possibilities.
Surgical outcomes: a Victorian viewpoint
January 2015
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Journal article
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Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England
Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy [Book review]
4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 5002 History and Philosophy Of Specific Fields
Patents, Priority Disputes and the Value of Credit: Towards a History (and Pre-History) of Intellectual Property in Medicine
July 2011
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Journal article
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Medical History
50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5002 History and Philosophy Of Specific Fields, Human Genome, Biotechnology, Genetics, Dissent and Disputes, England, General Surgery, History, 19th Century, Humans, Intellectual Property, Ovariectomy, Patents as Topic
Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch’s Medical Bacteriology [Book review]
The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune and Fame
January 2010
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Journal article
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Annals of Science
50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5002 History and Philosophy Of Specific Fields
Infecting Minds: The Past, Present and Future of Vaccine Hesitancy in South Africa
Dataset
To access qualitative research data for Infecting Minds, please contact Dickman Gareta, Head of Research Data Management at the Africa Health Research Institute (Dickman.Gareta@ahri.org)
Social Sciences, South Africa, Traditional Medicines, vaccine hesitancy, vaccines