In the small municipal hospital in the Bolivian highland town of Machacamarca (a pseudonym), the chilly air of the Andes seeps into the building, traveling through the thin walls and tile floors. The delivery room, situated next to the surgery ward, is especially cold; the air makes the metal gurney sitting in the middle of the room icy to the …
Case Studies in Social Medicine is a new series in the New England Journal of Medicine that began in 2018 and concluded in March of 2020, totaling 15 brief cases along with an introduction and conclusion. Authored by a group of clinicians and scholars in the social sciences and humanities, each piece is an attempt to use “the case” to …
If I were asked for a definition of myself, I would say that I am one who waits; I investigate my surroundings, I interpret everything in terms of what I discover, I become sensitive.
— Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
The world is not a safe place to live in.
— Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
As second-year …
I am delighted to contribute to this series on the Critical Histories and Activist Futures: Science, Medicine, and Racial Violence Conference. As captured by the submissions published here over the last few months, the content of the conference sparked productive conversations about history, health, and justice that are still ongoing here at Yale. But rather than focusing on the papers …
As I’ve written about on this site before, one of the best short programs for anyone interested in culture and mental health is the Summer School in Social and Cultural Psychiatry held annually at McGill. The course at the center of the curriculum is “Cultural Psychiatry: A Critical Introduction” which consists primarily of lectures by Laurence Kirmayer, Allan Young…
The conference on structural competency organized and hosted by Jonathan Metzl and Helena Hansen, and held at the NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis on March 23rd 2012, proved to be enormously successful. The conference was an experiment on the part of Hansen and Metzl to generate a new conversation among doctors, clinicians, urban planners, social theorists …