Welcome to the first installment of the Medical Humanities Literature Review. Before getting to the substantive annotation, a few points about methodology are important.
Again, as suggested in the initial post, this Review is by no means intended to be exhaustive. I cannot possibly survey all medical humanities journals, books, and articles, especially because the boundaries of what qualifies as medical humanities are unclear on the margins. Thus, the review is intended to act as a useful finder's tool, but most definitely not the only or even the comprehensive metacrawler.
So, after conferring with several professional medical humanists, I came up with a list of about 30 journals that publish or have published articles on topics that seem to relate to the medical humanities. Again, there are many, many more journals than these that publish MH-related articles, but I simply had to pare it down to something approaching a manageable list. My hope is to post about two Reviews a week, each containing articles from about 5-10 of the journals, ideally surveying each of the journals at least once a month.
Some of the journals selected are more obviously focused towards medical humanities than others. Thus, the entire issue of Medical Humanities, for example, may be relevant to a literature review, and therefore may merit the dedication of an entire Literature Review. Other reviews may pull one or two articles from different journals whose focus may not entirely be on the medical humanities. Naturally, assessing which articles merit inclusion in any given Review requires exercises in judgment. This is why the input and criticisms of the greater medical humanities community are integral to refining and improving the quality and usefulness of the metacrawler.
The substantive information compiled through the Literature Reviews will largely be abstracts, unless the paper is available in the public domain. If the latter, a link to the full-text paper will be provided. In addition, while the Social Science Research Network has exploded in popularity, the topic areas available (accounting, economics, entrepreneurship, information systems, law, management, and social insurance), aside from some of the legal and health policy subdomains, do not seem particularly likely to contain many articles and manuscripts related to medical humanities. If, however, papers and manuscripts related to MH are available on SSRN, I will endeavor to find them and link to them.
Finally, I will attempt to post information about new books that seem relevant to the medical humanities.
For those particularly interested in methodology, continue below the fold for a list of the journals I will attempt to survey.
In random order:
Medical Humanities
Medical Humanities Review
Literature and Medicine
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
J. of Kennedy Institute of Ethics
American J. of Bioethics
Hastings Center Report
Health Affairs
J. of Law, Medicine, and Ethics
J. of Medical Ethics
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics
J. of Clinical Ethics
J. of Medicine & Philosophy
Social Science & Medicine
Yale J. of Humanities in Medicine
Vesalius
J. of Legal Medicine
Ars Medica
Medical Anthropology
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Sociology of Health & Illness
J. of Religion & Health
J. of Medical Humanities
Isis
Soundings
Disability & Society
Disability Studies Quarterly
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