Surgery is a craft specialty: ‘doing’ in response to what is seen, felt and anticipated. The potent odours and the raw images of flesh, elicit strong sensations and responses in the here-and-now or ‘thisness’ (haecceities) of practice. These experiences, trigger a world of affects and senses that can disturb or rupture familiar or established ways of thinking and knowing. This book attempts to articulate these emotional complexities of learning and practice by exploring affective encounters with the uncertainty of medical events. Employing a practice based inquiry, grounded in philosophical notions of affect and related concepts, real stories of actual practice are analysed and theorised to examine how events of clinical practice come to matter or become meaningful to surgeons, potentially disclosing new or modified capacities to see, think, understand and act. The philosophical writings of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon and Brian Massumi inform the exploration. The critical discussions of this book are relevant for healthcare professionals, medical educators, practitioners and researchers interested in its main exploration: the affective conditions that emerge from disturbances in practice and their power to shape, construct and transform how professionals understand their practice and function within it.

Following criticisms of the traditionally polarized view of understanding suffering through either medicine or social justice, Lowe makes a compelling argument for how the medical humanities can help to go beyond the traditional biographical and epistemic breaks to see into the nature and properties of suffering and what is at stake. Lowe demonstrates through analysis of major healthcare workforce issues and incidence of burnout how key policies and practices influence healthcare education and experiences of both patients and health professionals. By including first person narratives from health professionals as a tool and resource, she illustrates how dominant ideas about the self enter practice as a refusal of suffering. Demonstrating the relationship between personal experience, theory and research, Lowe argues for a pedagogy of suffering that shows how the moral anguish implicit in suffering is an ethical response of the emergent self. This is an important read for all those interested in medical humanities, health professional education, person-centred care and the sociology of health and illness.

This book critically analyses how politics and power affect the ways that medicine is taught and learned. Challenging society’s historic reluctance to connect the realm of politics to the realm of medicine, Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice: The Contradiction Cure emphasizes the need for medical students to engage with social justice issues, including global health crises resulting from the climate emergency, and the health implications of widening social inequality. Arguing for an increased focus on community-based learning, rather than acute care, this innovative text maps the territory of medicine’s contradictory engagement with politics as a springboard for creative curriculum design. It demonstrates why the socially disempowered - such as political and climate refugees, the homeless, or those without health insurance should be primary subjects of attention for medical students, while exploring how political engagement can be refined, sharp, cultivated and creative, engaging imagination and demanding innovation Exploring how the medical humanities can promote engagement with politics to improve medical education, this book is a ground-breaking and inspiring contribution. It is an essential read for all those with a focus on medical education and medical humanities, as well as medical and healthcare students with an interest in the social determinants of health.

This innovative volume provides fresh perspectives on how medical students and patients construct identities in relation to each other, using stories of their clinical encounters. It explores how paying attention to medical students’ and patients’ stories in clinical teaching encounters can encourage empathy and the formation of professional identities that embody desirable values such as integrity and respect. Written by an experienced clinician and based on original, rigorous research combining ethnography and dialogic narrative analysis, Storytelling Encounters as Medical Education: Crafting Relational Identity includes patient stories alongside those of students and clinical teachers. This is an important contribution for all those interested in medical education, narrative medicine, person-centred care and identity formation in healthcare. It will also be of value to scholars in a range of other disciplines, who are using a dialogic approach.

Mobilizing Knowledge in Physiotherapy: Critical Reflections on Foundations and Practices is a collection of 15 collaboratively written critical essays, by 39 authors from 15 disciplines and seven countries. The book challenges some of the most important contemporary assumptions about physiotherapy knowledge, and makes the case for much more critical theory, practice, and education in physiotherapy health and social care. The book challenges the kinds of thinking that have traditionally bounded the profession and highlights the ways in which knowledge is now increasingly fluid, complex, and diffuse. The collection engages a range of critical social theories and interdisciplinary perspectives from within and without the profession. It includes sections focusing on evidence, practice, patient perspectives, embodiment, culture, diversity, digital worlds, and research methods. The book makes an important contribution to how we think about mobilizing knowledge, and it speaks to a diverse audience of academics, practitioners, educators, policy-makers, and students - both within physiotherapy and from a range of related health and social care disciplines. This book will be a useful reference for scholars interested in conceptions of professional knowledge, and the theory of professional education and practice in physiotherapy and beyond.

This thought-provoking book explores the connections between health, ethics, and soul. It analyzes how and why the soul has been lost from scientific discourses, healthcare practices, and ethical discussions, presenting suggestions for change. Arguing that the dominant scientific worldview has eradicated talk about the soul and presents an objective and technical approach to human life and its vulnerabilities, Ten Have and Pegoraro look to rediscover identity, humanity, and meaning in healthcare and bioethics. Taking a mulitidisciplinary approach, they investigate philosophical, scientific, historical, cultural, social, religious, economic, and environmental perspectives as they journey toward a new, global bioethics, emphasizing the role of the moral imagination. Bioethics, Healthcare and the Soul is an important read for students, researchers, and practitioners interested in bioethics and person-centred healthcare.

This book explores how person-centred health care could be refined to help persons alleviate pain-related distress and construct pain as a potentially positive experience. Rethinking Pain in Person-Centred Health Care is a fascinating contribution to the multidisciplinary literature on person-centred health care, pain and ethics. Traditionally, Western intellectual culture has downplayed the intuitive and emotional, promoting instead rational, natural-scientific perspectives. Applied to pain, an instrumental approach promotes the immediate and effective relief of pain, due to the widespread suffering and expense it can cause. However, different persons experience pain in different ways and Buetow moves beyond a commitment to eliminate pain to exploring how benefits of pain could include creating and managing meaning from pain. Rather than always looking to put pain behind them, persons may flourish by moving around pain, through pain, into pain and above pain. Buetow argues that this model depends on adopting a person-centred approach to health care, focusing less on the condition of pain and more on mobilizing the persons who present with, and manage, pain. This book will be of interest to professionals and academics/researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry who have a special interest in people with persistent pain conditions. It will also be an invaluable resource for physiotherapists, chronic pain consultants in secondary care and GPs.