In an era long before \'Doctor Google\', the question of how people accessed information about their bodies and their health is significant. This article investigates how medical knowledge about motherhood was disseminated in the pages of an entirely neglected and short-lived, yet important interwar Viennese periodical, Die Mutter: Halbmonatsschrift für alle Fragen der Schwangerschaft, Säuglingshygiene und Kindererziehung (The Mother: A Biweekly Magazine for All Questions about Pregnancy, Infant Hygiene and Child-Rearing). The magazine\'s founder, editor and champion was Gina Kaus, a bestselling, prize-winning author and screenplay writer. Die Mutter was part of a wider interwar Viennese press landscape of publications dedicated to mothers and motherhood, many of them produced by women for women. I suggest that periodicals about motherhood constituted an important alternative public sphere, one coming in part from the grassroots, rather than from a top-down municipal approach to public health-even in a city where mothers\' bodies were already a focal point for left-of-center politics and public health initiatives in the wake of World War I.

Stigma is one of the chief reasons for treatment-avoidant behaviour among people with mental health conditions. Stigmatising attitudes are spread through multiple determinants, including but not limited to: (i) individual beliefs; (ii) interpersonal influences; (iii) local cultural values and (iv) shared culture such as depictions in television shows. Our research indicates that popular television shows are currently understudied vectors for narratives that alternately reify or debunk assumptions and stereotypes about people with mental health conditions. Although such shows are fictional, they influence perception by normalising \'common sense\' assumptions over extended periods of time. Consequently, representations of patients, psychiatrists and treatments influence knowledge and understanding of mental health and treatment-seeking behaviour. While storytelling about sickness can inspire possibilities and bestow meaning on traumatic experiences, fictional narratives written without sufficient care can have the inverse effect of curtailing horizons and limiting expectations. Problematic portrayals of patients, mental health professionals and psychological interventions are often reductive and may increase stigma and prevent treatment-seeking behaviour. This article analyses the representation of hypnotherapy and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in Singaporean television dramas that attract a wide, mainstream audience. Our diverse team investigated dramas in all four of the official languages of Singapore: English, Mandarin Chinese, Bahasa Melayu and Tamil. We found that depictions of hypnotherapy tend to produce problematic images of mental health professionals as manipulative, able to read minds, engaging in criminal behaviour, lacking in compassion and self-interested. Meanwhile, representations of ECT typically focus on the fear and distress of the patient, and it is primarily depicted as a disciplinary tool rather than a safe and effective medical procedure for patients whose condition is severe and refractory to pharmacotherapy and behavioural interventions. These depictions have the potential to discourage treatment-seeking behaviour-when early intervention has found to be crucial-among vulnerable populations.

The aims of the present article are twofold. First, it attempts to theorise the thematic and ontological intersection between phenomenological and black bioethics and proposes \'Ontic-Black Bioethics\', a neologism to evince how the corporeal misconceptions (such as race construct, bodily othering and colourism) become the cultural impediment for black women healthcare professionals. The article draws specific insights from the philosophical anthropology of race, ranging from Richard Polt to Sarah Ahmed, to understand the epistemic structures of scientific racism. Second, it investigates how the racial attitudes of white healthcare professionals and supremacist patients towards black nurses can be potential triggers of cultural othering, corporeal burden and ethical quandaries by closely reading Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (2022) and Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult (2016). For this, the article relies on the theoretical frameworks of cultural phenomenology and somatic attention postulated by Thomas Csordas, Philipa Rothfield and other theoreticians of varying importance. While the corporeality of black nurses is replete with the images of biological misconception and racial-cultural constructs, the epistemic perspectives and literary representations underscoring their bodily and experiential agony have been scarcely examined through the lenses of bioethics. Thus, the article construes the corporeality of black nurses as the confluence of biological and cultural discourses under phenomenological bioethics.

This essay theorises what \'unmotherhood\'-or, living outside of motherhood-means within the specific context of \'the modern\'. Unmotherhood is an actively constructed state; it is explored through the parameters of agentive choice, social pressure and state control; and at the turn-of-the-20th-century novels articulate this state through specific vocabularies of contemporaneous phenomena of modernity. I look to four novels representative of four forms of unmotherhood: Tess Slesinger\'s The Unpossessed depicts a somewhat voluntary abortion; H.D.\'s Asphodel (and its sister novel Bid Me to Live) are fictional representations of the author\'s own stillbirth; Jean Rhys\'s Good Morning, Midnight depicts a woman\'s life in the wake of her newborn son\'s death and Nella Larsen\'s Quicksand is a narrative dependent on the protagonist\'s refusal to marry because of her equation of marriage with conception. Reading these narratives together affords us the opportunity to consider what \'unmotherhood\' means as a constructed state in and of itself, beyond the presumed negative, passive state of the \'not\' or the \'not yet\'. Through this analysis, I define \'unmotherhood\' as: (1) a state mediated through medical knowledge, objects, spaces and authority figures; (2) an experience narrated through vocabularies pulled from phenomena closely associated with 20th-century modernity and (3) a role dynamically shaped through compulsory heterosexuality embedded in familial relationships. In these three ways, my analysis of the selected novels defines unmotherhood as a permanent, transient, chosen, enforced and-contradictory as it all may be-a legible and definable experience.

This essay examines the portrayal of modern Black motherhood in Nella Larsen\'s Harlem Renaissance novel, Quicksand (1928). Writing in a cultural landscape dominated by discourses of racial uplift, scientific motherhood and eugenics, I argue that Larsen critiques and ultimately refuses the limited literary, medical and political terms available for representing Black motherhood in the early twentieth century. My readings centre Larsen\'s understudied career as a nurse; prior to becoming a writer, Larsen worked as Head Nurse at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and as a public health nurse for the Department of Health in the Bronx. I consider how this professional experience informed her fictional depiction of modern Black motherhood, drawing on archival materials to demonstrate how her novel complicates contemporaneous medical and cultural attitudes towards Black motherhood and resists the eugenic demands delineating what constitutes \'good\' and \'bad\' motherhood. Engaging contemporary Black feminist theories of refusal and Black motherhood, I show how Quicksand is not only a critique of racist stigmatising discourses and practices but also of how racism limits the ways in which Black mothers\' complexity has historically been represented.

In the early twentieth century, childbirth was increasingly being viewed as a medical experience in North America. Women were encouraged to engage with \'scientific motherhood\' by adhering to medical advice and undergoing the latest medical and technological interventions. Two movements simultaneously emerged that engaged with scientific motherhood: the positive eugenics movement, which sought to encourage reproduction among specific groups, and the twilight sleep movement, which promoted the use of pain management during childbirth. While these two distinct movements had different goals, they intersected both in their intended audiences (white, middle-class and upper-class American women) and in their prioritisation of medical and scientific authority. This article builds on work that has identified connections between twilight sleep and the eugenics movement to consider the role of twentieth-century magazines in rhetorically linking the eugenics and twilight sleep movements, and how this contributed to constructing the cultural role of the \'scientific mother\'.As a key proponent of twilight sleep, the American monthly periodical McClure\'s Magazine is the focus of this investigation. Articles published in McClure\'s incorporated the rhetoric of the eugenics movement to promote twilight sleep and \'painless childbirth\', while also engaging with concerns of the eugenics movement by framing the falling birthrate among American women as a social and political problem. Alongside the rhetorical framing within McClure\'s articles, we focus on visual material such as photographs that exhibit \'eugenic mothers\' and healthy \'twilight sleep babies\' to promote the method\'s safety and efficacy to American audiences. This article incorporates scholarship on early twentieth-century eugenics and photography, women\'s involvement in the eugenics movement, and twilight sleep and the politics of women\'s health. Through its analysis, this article demonstrates that the convergence of developments in obstetrics and the eugenics movement in popular media had complex implications for women\'s reproductive agency in the early twentieth century.

In recent decades, physicians have diagnosed fictional and non-fictional characters through portraits, biographies and writing. We argue that such an exercise can be beneficial for a uniquely health humanities reason-better understanding of our current world and the social determinants of health. Drawing on the method of health and social justice studies, we explore the character of Shosha, who appears repeatedly in the writings of Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer\'s strong story-telling skill and commitment to writing about the Jewish communities of prewar Poland in vivid detail preserve a slice of history, ensure that future generations will better understand what was destroyed by Nazi extermination policies, and provide lessons for modern political, hunger and war threats to human health. Shosha suffers from a lifelong debilitating disease that neither Singer nor subsequent commentaries ever name. The authors focus first on diagnosing the disease by consulting medical literature and experts. They then examine the value and pitfalls of this exercise and suggest that the lessons of understanding the disease historically, for teaching physicians how to recognise diseases rooted in war and poverty, and for enlightening all of us to the risks faced in human health by a world increasingly taking up arms and sliding towards fascism make diagnosing Shosha necessary and meaningful.

Lady health workers (LHWs) provide lifesaving maternal and child health services to >60% of Pakistan\'s population but are poorly compensated and overburdened. Moreover, LHWs\' training does not incorporate efforts to nurture attributes necessary for equitable and holistic healthcare delivery. We developed an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum, deriving its strengths from local art and literature, to enhance character virtues such as empathy and connection, interpersonal communication skills, compassion and purpose among LHWs. We tested the curriculum\'s feasibility and impact to enhance character strengths among LHWs.We conducted a multiphase mixed-methods pilot study in two towns of Karachi, Pakistan. We delivered the humanities curriculum to 48 LHWs via 12 weekly sessions, from 15 June to 2 September 2021. We developed a multiconstruct character strength survey that was administered preintervention and postintervention to assess the impact of the training. In-depth interviews were conducted with a subset of randomly selected participating LHWs.Of 48 participants, 47 (98%) completed the training, and 34 (71%) attended all 12 sessions. Scores for all outcomes increased between baseline and endline, with highest increase (10.0 points, 95% CI 2.91 to 17.02; p=0.006) observed for empathy/connection. LHWs provided positive feedback on the training and its impact in terms of improving their confidence, empathy/connection and ability to communicate with clients. Participants also rated the sessions highly in terms of the content\'s usefulness (mean: 9.7/10; SD: 0.16), the success of the sessions (mean: 9.7/10; SD: 0.17) and overall satisfaction (mean: 8.2/10; SD: 3.3).A humanities-based training for front-line health workers is a feasible intervention with demonstrated impact of nurturing key character strengths, notably empathy/connection and interpersonal communication. Evidence from this study highlights the value of a humanities-based training, grounded in local literature and cultural values, that can ultimately translate to improved well-being of LHWs thus contributing to better health outcomes among the populations they serve.

Empathy, self-reflection, and inclusion of the medical humanities in medical education are increasingly gaining attention. This seems prudent, as studies indicate that high physician empathy is associated with better patient outcomes and could protect against physician burnout. In addition, utilizing self-reflection has been reported to surge diagnostic accuracy and increase the ability of clinical health care providers. Therefore, in medical education, there is a need to address these, however intricate, most important skills. Not oblivious to this, for decades many medical schools have reaped experience from the humanities, sprouting the field of the medical humanities. However, significant barriers encountered when teaching the medical humanities to medical students are of concern. Consequently, a theory-based, inclusive, representative, and intuitive approach to the teachings is coveted. The aim of this article is to describe and present such an approach. To this end, I introduce a novel Model of Empathetic Development by Literature, schematizing the path from reading a text to displaying an act of empathy. Ever mindful of the relevance and feasibility to medical students, this article reflects on thoughts and evidence behind the hypothesis; that sense of belonging, self-reflection, and empathy could be gained by reading and discussing literary fiction. Referring to both original research articles, books of popular science, and philosophical considerations, a clear line of reasoning for the inclusion of literary fiction in medical education is made. Thereafter, it is outlined, how-in a medical humanities course at Copenhagen University-specific literary excerpts are utilized to bring forth reflection on different aspects, circumstances, and conditions of being a physician, thereby kindling the medical students\' sense of belonging to their profession. As such, this perspective piece demonstrates a concrete approach to how a literary educative technique could manifest.

The genesis of the medical humanities as a discrete academic discipline engendered a need for a theoretical framework, a function taken on by the growing narrative medicine movement. More recently, scholars have begun to develop a critical medical humanities, an analytical movement that emphasises the fundamental enmeshment of the sciences and humanities. Building on Helene Scott-Fordsmand\'s work on reversing the medical humanities, this paper develops an alternative to the current version of narrative medicine. We propose a new interpretive heuristic, the Double Helix Model, and place it in critical dialogue with the Columbia School\'s close reading based-approach. Through this new conceptual frame, we suggest that critical narrative medicine may empower clinicians to contribute to the reorientation of the roles of the sciences and humanities, benefiting providers, scholars and patients.