Papers by Jane Macnaughton
Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, Sep 1, 2009
Palgrave studies in literature, science and medicine, 2021
Contexts and Approaches: 'The Age of the Breath'? 'The Age of the Breath': in the view of the phi... more Contexts and Approaches: 'The Age of the Breath'? 'The Age of the Breath': in the view of the philosopher Luce Irigaray, this characterises the late twentieth century and beyond. 1 Irigaray's idea is a variation of the threefold scheme of Christian history of the medieval theologian Joachim da Fiore: the Age of the Father (the Old Testament, the Law), the Age of the Son (the New Testament, freedom from the Law), and the Age of the Spirit (a utopian age of universal love). Like the Age of the Spirit, Irigaray's 'Age of the Breath' potentially transcends major limitations of history, specifically on issues of gender and all that follows from differently conceived relations between men and women. Breath is central to this in her reworking of a major philosophical predecessor, Martin Heidegger. 2 Heidegger is admired: he thought radically, working not only from what had already been thought but attempting to see nakedly from the bases of thinking. Irigaray's critique is not of Heidegger himself, but of Heidegger as representative of even the best in the tradition of Western philosophy, limited by its unrecognised assumption of the thinking subject as male. For Heidegger the primary element is earth-solid, and for Irigaray, masculine. For Irigaray more primary, D. Fuller (B) •
The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Aug 1, 2013
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2015
Journal of Applied Arts & Health
Within arts and health, participatory songwriting is recognized as an enjoyable and effective way... more Within arts and health, participatory songwriting is recognized as an enjoyable and effective way to encourage emotional connectedness and social cohesion. This study used phenomenological ethnography to consider how collaborative songwriting might enhance the participatory experience of a Singing for Breathing group for people with breathlessness and chronic lung disease. Participants used the songwriting process to celebrate and develop their shared identity, musical and cultural heritage. Songwriting enabled participants to share their lived experiences of the anxiety and social isolation of chronic lung disease, and thereby to explore their being ‘all in the same boat’ musically, culturally and existentially. When considered within the context of similar singing-based and writing-based research, this study suggests that participatory and collaborative songwriting projects might confer psychosocial benefits to a group and to its members. While further research is needed, we propo...
Political philosophy and bioethics
Lecture given as part of the Masters in Bioethics course at the University of Notre Dame Australia
Edinburgh University Press, 2018
A properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities. Such h... more A properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities. Such historical grounding requires taking a long cultural perspective, going beyond traditional medical history – typically the history of disease, treatment and practice – to trace the origins and development of the ideas that underpin medicine in its broadest sense – ideas concerning the most fundamental aspects of human existence: health and illness, body and mind, gender and family, care and community. Historical sources can only go so far in illuminating such topics; we must also look to other cultural texts, and in particular literary texts, which, through their imaginative worlds, provide crucial insights into cultural and intellectual attitudes, experience and creativity. Reading from a critical medical humanities perspective requires not only cultural archaeology across a range of discourses, but also putting past and present into conversation, to discover continuities and contrasts w...
Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 2020
Anecdotal experience and qualitative accounts suggest that singing groups, classes or choirs spec... more Anecdotal experience and qualitative accounts suggest that singing groups, classes or choirs specifically for people with COPD (henceforth referred to as COPD-SGs) are effective in improving health. However, this is not reflected in the quantitative evidence. This meta-ethnography deployed phenomenological methods to explore this discrepancy. Analysis identified the phenomena of being together, being uplifted and being involved as central benefits of COPD-SGs. When viewed through the phenomenological lens of body-social as distinct from body-subject and body-object, findings demonstrated that the qualitative effectiveness of COPD-SGs is greatest on a collective basis. Qualitative research into the effectiveness of COPD-SGs offers more favourable results because phenomenological approaches can identify collective benefits that quantitative methods cannot. COPD-SGs should seek to maximise these collective benefits by rediscovering their cultural and artistic heritage within the nation...
Your yen two wol slee me sodenly; I may the beautee of hem not sustene, So woundeth hit thourghou... more Your yen two wol slee me sodenly; I may the beautee of hem not sustene, So woundeth hit thourghout my herte kene. 1 Thus Geoffrey Chaucer on the beauty of his lady's eyes, their power so great that she is 'of [his] lyf and deeth the quene' (9). Her beauty has chased pity from her heart and purchased him his death. These lines play on the medieval convention of love as illness that only the beloved can cure, and conceive of female beauty as an ambiguous force, enthralling in both positive and negative terms. In romance, the dominant fictional genre of the medieval period, female beauty is an imperative, signalling virtue and nobility, opening the way to the divine and inspiring the highest ideals, but at the same time dangerous, destructive, treacherous. Its powers can be magical and life-enhancing, literally wish-fulfilling, but also corrosive, imprisoning and deathdealing. Secular literary texts engage with the difficulties of interpreting beauty, of making sense of its affect. At the same time, beauty is strangely unelaborated in romance texts: interpretation cannot rest on detailed description of beauty, but must probe its often concealed valences, its collocations, and especially, the actions and consequences that attend beauty. Beauty proves virtue not only in those who possess it, but also in those who experience its power, both within and beyond the text. The fraught relation of physical beauty to the mind and soul has a long history. Mark McIntosh's essay in this volume shows compellingly the enduring relation of beauty to the divine. The idea of beauty is crucial to the Platonic concept of ideal forms underlying nature: in the Phaedrus, Plato depicts beauty as shining out in the
Medical Humanities, Jun 2, 2023
Medical humanities has tended first and foremost to be associated with the ways in which the arts... more Medical humanities has tended first and foremost to be associated with the ways in which the arts and humanities help us to understand health. However, this is not the only or necessarily the primary aim of our field. What the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed above all is what the field of critical medical humanities has insisted on: the deep entanglement of social, cultural, historical life with the biomedical. The pandemic has been a time for reinstating the power of expertise of a particular kind, focusing on epidemiology, scientific modelling of potential outcomes and vaccine development. All of this delivered by science at speed. It has been challenging for medical humanities researchers to find purchase in these debates with insights from our more contemplative, 'slow research' approaches. However, as the height of the crisis passes, our field might now be coming into its own. The pandemic, as well as being productive of scientific expertise, also demonstrated clearly the meaning of culture: that it is not a static entity, but is produced and evolves through interaction and relationship. Taking a longer view, we can see the emergence of a certain 'COVID-19 culture' characterised by entanglements between expert knowledge, social media, the economy, educational progress, risk to health services and people in their socio-economic, political ethnic and religious/ spiritual contexts. It is the role of medical humanities to pay attention to those interactions and to examine how they play out in the human experience and potential impact of the pandemic. However, to survive and grow in significance within the field of healthcare research, we need to engage not just to comment. There is a need for medical humanities scholars to assert our expertise in interdisciplinary research, fully engaged with experts by experience, and to work proactively with funders to demonstrate our value.
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2021
Seeing the entwinement of social and epistemic challenges through COVID, we discuss the perils of... more Seeing the entwinement of social and epistemic challenges through COVID, we discuss the perils of simplistic appeals to ‘follow the science’. A hardened scientism risks excarbating social conflict and fueling conspiracy beliefs. Instead, we see an opportunity to devise more inclusive medical knowledge practices through endorsing experiential knowledge alongside traditional evidence types.
In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the cr... more In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area. Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performanc...
Edinburgh University Press, 2018
A central tenet of critical medical humanities is the claim that biomedicine does not hold all th... more A central tenet of critical medical humanities is the claim that biomedicine does not hold all the keys to understanding the experience of illness, how responses to treatment are mediated, or how outcomes and prognosis are revealed over time. We further suggest that biomedicine cannot wholly explain how illness may be expressed physiologically. So much that influences that expression derives from cultural context, emotional response, and how illness is interpreted and understood that this knowledge cannot be exhausted with the tools of biomedicine.
Doctors may be thrust into the difficult situation of treatingfiends and colleagues. A doctor'... more Doctors may be thrust into the difficult situation of treatingfiends and colleagues. A doctor's response to this situation is strongly influenced by his or her emotions and by medical tradition. Such patients may be treated as 'special cases' but the 'special' treatment can backfire and lead to an adverse outcome. Why does this happen and can doctors avoid it happening? These issues are discussed in this commentary on Dr Crisci's paper, 'The ultimate curse' (1). Dr Crisci describes a situation that doctors dread: professional involvement in a case of serious illness in a friend. He describes movingly his experience of dealing with a colleague who, having attempted suicide, ends up in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) 'the ultimate curse' as he calls it. His paper raises a number of ethical issues: firstly, should a person's desire to end his life be respected; secondly, how should we deal with a case of persistent vegetative state; and t...
Nordic Journal of Arts, Culture and Health, 2020
Purpose: For years, the Arts and Health (AaH) movement has been guided by values of art for art's... more Purpose: For years, the Arts and Health (AaH) movement has been guided by values of art for art's sake, practitioner as Artist and artist as Outsider. These values are instrumental to the effectiveness of AaH as a relational and processdriven tool for individual empowerment, collective health activism and social change. This paper explores how the AaH movement, together with the artists operating as AaH practitioners, has responded to the political and economic and policy transitions of recent years. Methodology: This paper critically analyses and updates the frequently-cited Diamond model of Smith (2003) and Macnaughton, White and Stacy (2005) exploring how and why, within a UK context of neoliberalism, austerity and evidence-based practice, AaH is being increasingly drawn into the methods and governance of medical and rehabilitative services. Findings: Whenever AaH in the UK is governed by health services, it becomes reconceptualised as therapy or treatment. It risks relinquishing its artistic and philosophical identity and distinctive effectiveness. Originality: This paper builds upon the Diamond model to present two new models, the Stalactite and the Helictite. These new models conceptualise the current situation and the potential future fragmentation of the AaH movement, highlighting how AaH might remain faithful to its core values. Keywords Arts and health, arts as treatment, participatory arts, artists in health settings, social prescribing Arts and Health (AaH) and the AaH 'movement' "Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!" (Rowling, 1997, p. 95
New developments in the arts and health
BMJ, 2000
Will expand the scope of medical studies
Medical Humanities Companion
Medical Humanities Companion, 2017
We very much appreciate the help given us by the Chaplains and Chaplaincy volunteers of the five ... more We very much appreciate the help given us by the Chaplains and Chaplaincy volunteers of the five NHS Trusts that participated in this study. The Principal Investigator would like to thank, in particular, the Lead Chaplains who not only took part in interviews but also managed the distribution and collection of questionnaires and always made time to talk and answer my many questions-and for all those cups of tea I am eternally grateful. We would like to acknowledge the time given by other staff members, by visitors and by patients who not only completed the questionnaire but in many cases also agreed to be interviewed. Finally, after months of discussion and debate we came to depend, for one part of the study (the Mood Survey), on student volunteers from Phase I and Phase II of the medical degree, based at the Queens Campus, Durham University and we are grateful to them for their willing participation.
Cadernos de Saúde Pública, 2014
This article explores some effects of the British payment for performance model on general practi... more This article explores some effects of the British payment for performance model on general practitioners’ principles and practice, which may contribute to issues related to financial incentive modalities and quality of primary healthcare services in low and middle-income countries. Aiming to investigate what general practitioners have to say about the effect of the British payment for performance on their professional ethos we carried out semi-structured interviews with 13 general practitioner educators and leaders working in academic medicine across the UK. The results show a shift towards a more biomedical practice model and fragmented care with nurse practitioners and other health care staff focused more on specific disease conditions. There has also been an increased medicalisation of the patient experience both through labelling and the tendency to prescribe medications rather than non-pharmacological interventions. Thus, the British payment for performance has gradually streng...
Uploads
Papers by Jane Macnaughton