Pardon the navel-gazing: I (we?) am (are?) toying with the idea of instituting a Medical Humanities Podcast Series. I'd like to solicit feedback on this, so comments are welcome either on the blog or over email.
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Tacked 12/22
Excuse the navel-gazing, but readership continues to increase, we have four guest-bloggers (but are always seeking more), and the MH Blog has already exceeded my admittedly humble expectations.
The blogosphere has proved more powerful a tool for discourse on the medical humanities than I had dared hope, so I have the relatively ambitious notion of hosting a Medical Humanities Blog Workshop. This may be over-ambitious, so I'd like to throw some questions out to any and all potential readers:
do you think the idea has legs? Why or why not?
To make this worthwhile, we'd need to have at least 3-4 submissions, though the idea of a Workshop is that works in progress are just as welcome as manuscripts nearing submission. If there is enough interest, I think that it could be fruitful.
Please leave a comment with your thoughts or email me separately if you would be so kind as to share your perspectives.
As always, thanks for reading and contributing.
Slowly but surely, we are making progress in adding voices to the MH Blog other than mine own. I am pleased to introduce Frank Pasquale as our latest guest-blogger. Frank is currently an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School. He holds an M. Phil. from Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and a J.D. from Yale.
His scholarship focuses on intellectual property and health law and policy. I enjoy Frank's work in particular because he brings a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective, especially as to his musings on health law and policy.
Frank is already an extremely active blogger at both Concurring Opinions and at Madisonian.net. Adding his voice here at MH Blog saves me the trouble of constantly linking to his posts.
Welcome!
While we try to keep the navel-gazing around here to a minimum, I did think it was important to announce that I have entered into an agreement with Newstex, a commercial blog aggregator that standardizes blog content and delivers it to clients across of a variety of sectors.
Given the Creative Commons 3.0 License the blog content is licensed under, use of the content for commercial purposes is prohibited absent the express permission of the site owner. I had to think quite carefully about whether I wanted to waive this prohibition in this instance, and it was not easy to do so.
Though the compensation involved is likely to be quite small, the effects of money on behavior are often only weakly correlated with the value of the gift (this comes up frequently in the literature on conflicts of interest in clinical research, for example). Nevertheless, after much consideration, I decided to accept Newstex's offer and anonymously donate all proceeds therein to an entity connected to the medical humanities (name withheld to preserve the anonymity of the gift!).
As always, comments are welcome.
We here at MH Blog would like to extend a hearty welcome to Patrick S. O'Donnell, who will be joining us as a guest-blogger. Patrick has led a fascinating life, to say the least. After earning a M.A. in religious studies, he worked in construction, and then for over a decade as a finish carpenter. One of his former instructors at University of California Santa Barbara, Nandini Iyer, wife of the late Raghavan Iyer, and mother of the travel writer, novelist, and Time essayist, Pico Iyer, asked him to fill in for her while she went on sabbatical.
Soon enough, Santa Barbara City College realized what it had on its hands, and asked Patrick to hang up his toolbelt and teach classes in Comparative World Religions and Critical Thinking. He has also taught courses in Political Thinking and in Animal Ethics. He names as mentors two scholars whose work I am well acquainted with, in Dennis Patterson and Oliver Leaman. His current interests include ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and he is also cultivating interests in philosophy of mind, and, of course, medical humanities.
Like Jeff Lipshaw, I've had the pleasure of "meeting" Patrick in the comments of various blogs I haunt, and a more knowledgeable, insightful, well-read, and decorous interlocutor I have yet to find. Welcome, Patrick!
Readers of the MH Blog may have noticed a bit of a turn to health policy matters in recent months. This turn reflects both some of my professional and developing scholarly interests, as I have begun to cultivate an interest particularly in public health policy and associated discourses.
With that in mind, we at MH Blog are proud to join Health Wonk Review, and to link to the latest version, hosted by Bob Laszewski over at Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review. Shameless Plug: a post of ours made the Review.
Lots of fascinating posts worth looking at.
FYI, we will be hosting the Health Wonk Review on August 23, 2007.
We don't normally say much about the blogs and websites we link to in our blogrolls to the right, though we are constantly adding new blogs. I'd like to take just a few moments here to mention a few of the most recent additions.
Over in the "Bioethics" section, the two newest links are the Hooked: Ethics, Medicine & Pharma Blog, authored by Howard Brody, and the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that Dr. Brody is the Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at UTMB, where I am currently a graduate student. Here's a description of the aims and purposes of the weblog:
Welcome! I am creating this blog to accompany the recent publication of my book, Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry (Rowman and Littlefield, January 2007--see links). My major goal with this blog is to allow updates on the book's contents. The topic--the relationship between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry--is hot right now, and practically every day, new developments occur and new information is published. I wanted to have a platform to inform interested readers of those developments that seem to me especially pertinent or important, and that might modify some statement or fact given in the book.
Relations between clinicians, investigators, and industry are a long-standing source of interest for me, and there are few more expert on this than Dr. Brody. Recommended.
The other new link in "Bioethics Blogs", the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog, is long overdue. Edited by two palliative medicine physicians, Drew Rosielle and Christian Sinclair, here is an excerpt from the FAQ:
Our target audience is the professionals (MD, DO, RN, LPN, LVN, Home Health Aide, ARNP, SW, Chaplain, Administrators, PT, OT, Speech, Pharmacy, etc.) working in hospice & palliative medicine, but we welcome all readers to this blog, including patients, families and other medical professionals outside of this field.
Our goal is to review current palliative medicine, hospice, end-of-life research with a particular focus on publications not from the major palliative care journals. We also highlight important events in end-of-life care from the news media and entertainment arenas.
A must-read for anyone interested in palliative medicine and end-of-life care.
Also, we've added two new links to our "Disability Blogs" category: Disapedia.com, which seems a great resource, and Disabilityblog.info, a great tool for "metablogging."
This is not a personal blog, but because my posts and perspectives inevitably reflect my professional pursuits, I did want to mention that I have officially begun a new job. Details are reflected in the About page.
Long-time readers of the blog may have noticed a change in the literature review methodology, which has recently consisted more of cites to SSRN than of reviews of the latest journals. There are several reasons for this. First, the literature reviews are quite time-consuming when they involve collating abstracts from selected journals. SSRN is quite user-friendly, and involves much less time and effort on my part. Second, SSRN often provides full-text links to the articles, which is a tremendous boon, IMO. Third, I like to support open-source projects wherever possible.
In any case, I will endeavor to continue reviewing selected journals where possible, but the aforementioned reasons make it more likely that I will largely use SSRN in the foreseeable future. Those who disagree with this perspective or, better yet, who wish to offer their services in helping me compile the journal articles (!) are invited to communicate as such.
With that said, a number of interesting articles have appeared on SSRN recently. Topics covered below the fold include neuroethics, comparative mental disability law, equal access and global health disparities, and tort reform.
Nick Genes, the Blogfather of Grand Rounds, generally does a Pre-Rounds Q&A with all those unlucky fortunate enough to host Grand Rounds. He asked some terrific questions, especially about the medical humanities, and you can read the whole interview on Medscape here.
