MedHums Creative Portfolio: Gemma Wilson

January 12, 2017January 12, 2017 / mendtjones / Leave a comment

Next in our series introducing creative portfolios is Gemma Wilson, who graduated from the MSc in Medical Humanities in 2015. She is now a Lecturer in the School of Community Health and Midwifery at UCLan.

In what follows, Gemma reflects on select works and pages from her journal:

Hospital Gown

Gemma Wilson, Embroidered hospital gown (front)

Gemma Wilson, Embroidered hospital gown (back)

This piece was inspired by an article entitled ‘White Coat, Patient Gown‘ (Wellbery and Chan, 2014), which discusses the fact that although a lot of attention has been paid to the symbolic power of the doctor’s white coat, very little has been written about the patient gown. Prior to this, I hadn’t given much thought to the gown, although it is something I had come across every day when practising as a midwife.

Gemma Wilson, Embroidered hospital gown (detail)

I began to consider the act of putting on the gown and becoming a patient, and the impact that might have on an individual. I started to think about the words we associate with being a patient and decided to embroider them onto a hospital gown. I was interested in making those unspoken assumptions, ideas and beliefs visible.

Gemma Wilson, Embroidered hospital gown (detail)

Overall, the process made me more aware of what we take for granted in terms of the power structures within health care and how these are reinforced. When a person wears a hospital gown, it transforms them from an individual (with specific needs, ideas, beliefs and wants) to the role of a patient whose identity and needs become determined by medical criteria.

Gemma Wilson, Embroidered hospital gown (detail)

There’s Much More To Me Than My Carotid Artery

I wrote this journal entry after a visit to the Manchester Museum, where I encountered an exhibit displaying the skeleton of an unknown woman next to the skeletons of apes and prehistoric humans. I found this both disturbing and baffling. Disturbing, as I hold the belief that human remains should be treated with respect – something that has been taught and reinforced to me through the values within our society. It was baffling to me that the woman’s remains could be treated as an object for education and entertainment, because her identity was unknown; whereas, if she had an identity – and possibly living ancestors – this would be completely objectionable. I couldn’t reconcile the reasoning or logic behind this, and it left me feeling quite angry and frustrated.

Gemma Wilson, There’s much more to me than my carotid artery

I imagined my own skeleton in the museum years into the future – my experiences, successes, failures, triumphs and tragedies all forgotten and unknown to the strangers who peer at my bones from the other side of the glass. This experience taught me that we can think that we have fairly strong shared beliefs that link us as a society or a profession, but when we start to look closer at things, we see inconsistencies all around us.

Heart-Sink Patient

I wrote this story after a Medical Humanities session with a doctor who was discussing ‘heart-sink patients’. As soon as these patients step through the clinic door, the doctor’s heart will sink, because they are ‘difficult’ in some way.

Gemma Wilson, Heart-sink patient

I began to think of the experiences of an elderly relative of mine who had an unshakeable trust in medicine. She truly believed that doctors could work miracles to the extent that she would regularly make trips to the GP to see if they could cure her old age. When they told her there still was nothing they could do, her heart would sink, but she never gave up, and every month or so she would return to see if there was a new medicine or treatment that would help reverse the effects of time.

This inspired me to write a story around the idea of a ‘heart-sink doctor’: about a retired woman and her complex relationship with both medicine and her family.

I found that creative writing was a really effective way of exploring complex and interlinked ideas within a short space of time.

Books I Love

A journal entry about books Gemma read for leisure as she was studying medical humanities – but which influenced her thinking around health, wellbeing and medicine.

Gemma Wilson, Books I Love

And finally, here are Gemma’s thoughts on assembling a creative portfolio for the course more generally:

Prior to the completion of this creative journal, I hadn’t done anything creative like this; however, I found this to be one of the most rewarding and important learning experiences I’ve had. It pushed me to move out of my comfort zone and to think of new ways of approaching, understanding and presenting a variety of content. The freedom we were given to explore our own ideas also meant that we had the opportunity to discover our passions and interests within medical humanities, which was so useful later in the course (and beyond).

All artwork and images © Gemma Wilson.

Five Questions for… Sarah Collins

September 16, 2016 / mendtjones / Leave a comment

Dr Sarah Collins is Senior Lecturer in Communication, Lead for Clinical Communication, Co-Director of the MSc in Medical Humanities, and Lead for Year 3 Patient-Centred Consulting at Manchester Medical School. In today’s contribution to our Meet the MedHumLab Members series, Sarah shares with us her interactive and creative approach to teaching communication to medical students.

Patrick Birch, medical student, performs a one-man play about homelessness in the Consultation Skills Learning Centre, Manchester Medical School

You are the co-director, with Carsten Timmermann, of the MSc in Medical Humanities. How do you see the role of medical humanities in medical education?

The practice of medicine is founded on the relationship between the patient and doctor. This relationship is formed and played out through the consultation. Trust, a genuine interest in the person and their everyday concerns, and an understanding of the social and medical context of their illness and disease, are key in effective, patient-centred care. To be able to understand and engage with the patient requires scientific knowledge and artistic imagination. Every individual doctor or medical student carries their own unique capacity for entering into the worlds of their patients. These acts of understanding require creative thinking, self-expression, and all the senses. In these respects, medical humanities provides a sounding board for students to appreciate the lives of their patients, and to develop their own capacities for expressing and responding to emotion, acting intuitively and with sensitivity, and learning to look after their patients, their colleagues and themselves.

Dr Sarah Collins at the opening of the Consultation Skills Learning Centre with Dame Nancy Rothwell and Professor Doug Corfield

You have designed, with a number of colleagues, the Consultation Skills Learning Centre in Stopford Building, which opened in 2012. Can you explain what makes this facility unique and how it helps students to gain confidence in communicating with patients and medical staff?

We designed the Consultation Skills Learning Centre on a principle of combining open, public areas with private spaces. This reflects the way in which health care is organized and delivered, and allows students to navigate themselves and their simulated or visiting patients through different areas of a clinic. Our design was inspired in part by my research on the geography of communication in head and neck cancer outpatients. This research has also found its way into our teaching.

We turn the Centre into ‘Stopford A&E’, for example: in which spontaneous, dramatic events as well as informal conversations happen in the corridor and waiting room; the students are suddenly called on to answer the phone; while the side rooms provide opportunities to gather clinical information, listen to patients’ stories and carry out physical examinations.

In delivering teaching, the open central areas and the more private consulting rooms allow tutors to share ideas and co-teach during a session while at the same time delivering their own teaching to students in a side room. We have ‘acoustic curtains’ to close off the private space – thick curtains which block out sound (and which are therefore more effective than hospital curtains) – but which can also be opened to provide for all the ‘patients’ and the teaching and learning activities to be open and seen.

Sarah engaged in conversation with students

As the winner of a Teaching Excellence Award in 2012/13, can you tell us a bit more about your approach to teaching communication skills to medical students?

My approach to teaching communication is student-centred, creative (drawing on different theories and concepts and applying these in imaginative and new ways) and multidisciplinary. Although ‘communication skills’ is the standard term used to describe what students need to be able to practise effective communication with their patients, there is of course more to this than ‘skills’ – it is also knowledge, attitude, intuition, reflection. We use the terms ‘consultation’ and ‘patient-centred consulting’ to reflect the broad array of influences and dimensions that all come into play in an interaction between an individual patient and the doctor or medical student.

I make a point of learning all the students’ names and remembering details about their lives. The relationship with students in teaching is essential in order to foster open discussion and critical thinking. I involve the students’ ideas and contributions in our curriculum – for example, students have written dramatic dialogues which we now perform on a regular basis for all students, e.g. ‘In the Waiting Room’ in our session ‘Mental Health Stories’. For ‘Stopford A&E’, I asked final year students to write the session, and they now teach this session each year to the second year students, with support from my clinician colleagues. And I draw on different media – spoken, written, visual, art, photography, music – to set the scene for an individual session or to create an interlude within it for everyone to share thoughts and ideas.

Music, Literature, Art and Medicine: an evening of performances by medical students at the Anthony Burgess Foundation, November 2015

How does your interdisciplinary background in languages and linguistics, communication, social science and education, and creative writing inform your teaching?

I use my interdisciplinary background to create the content and form for every session I design: the combination of disciplines allows us to represent the consultation and the doctor-patient relationship in its multiple and diverse forms. In terms of teaching and learning activities, we incorporate drawing, listening to music, creative writing of dialogue and narrative, ethnographic observation of clinical settings, and discussions about educational methods, into both tutor development and student learning.

Creative approaches to teaching and learning communication: Sarah and colleagues at the International Conference for the European Association of Communication in Healthcare, Heidelberg, September 2016

And finally, how do you relax and unwind away from the office, CSLC, lecture theatre and seminar room?

I love cooking, gardening, writing poetry, wandering around art galleries, walking long distances, going to the cinema, and most of all spending time with my family.

MedHums Creative Portfolio: Amina Kreusch

September 14, 2016September 14, 2016 / mendtjones / Leave a comment

Next in our Students Reflect on MedHums series, in which we showcase creative portfolios assembled by students on the MSc in Medical Humanities, is Amina Kreusch, whose journal contains a range of fascinating visual and textual material.

Amina Kreusch, Introduction, 2013/14

Amina explains in her introduction how the journal became a space for reflection, exploration, discovery and experimentation. It covers historical, cultural and sociological topics – some of a very personal nature. According to Amina, the illness and passing of her grandfather on the one hand and the experience of spending a year in Manchester as an international student on the other made her aware of the fleeting nature of time, and the cycle of life and death more generally – themes that pervade the journal both explicitly and on a more subtle level.

Amina describes the process of creating a journal in the following terms:

Coming from a science-focused degree, assembling a creative portfolio seemed a daunting task at first. But in the course of the first semester looking for scraps of interesting stories and everyday encounters that related to reflecting on medicine and, more broadly, on health and disease, life and death, became a habit I would not want to miss anymore.

My favourite part was putting different sources of material and text types to work. I collected photographs, digital media, and drawings of my own while also experimenting with poems, short prose, and documenting oral history.

The journal contains exhibition and film reviews, poems, reflections on public perceptions of diseases such as diabetes and cancer, photographs, drawings, and more:

Amina Kreusch, Journal, 2013/14

Amina reflects on the ways in which putting together a creative portfolio shaped her understanding of the Medical Humanities:

The journal played a significant part in how the MSc helped open up my perception of how thoroughly the medical humanities pervade our work as healthcare professionals as well as personal lives, all the while moving away from a purely medical gaze.

All artwork and images © Amina Kreusch.

MedHums Creative Portfolio: Alice Ryrie

August 23, 2016August 23, 2016 / mendtjones / Leave a comment

Our new Students Reflect on MedHums series showcases creative portfolios assembled by students on the MSc in Medical Humanities during the academic years 2013/14 and 2014/15. The journals and portfolios were part of the assessment for the semester 1 module Major Themes in Medial Humanities, led by Sarah Collins and Carsten Timmermann.

We begin with Alice Ryrie, whose artwork, journal and comments demonstrate how creative coursework can lead to fascinating new insights and a deeper understanding of themes in Medical Humanities.

Alice Ryrie, Sanguine, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Choleric, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Melancholic, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Phlegmatic, 2014/15

Alice shared her thoughts on writing a journal for the course:

Being given the opportunity to write a journal was for all of us an exciting, yet slightly daunting task. The journal was a chance to try something a bit different and document thoughts, inspirations and creative ideas with a clear set of aims and framework to focus on.

Some of the ideas I started putting together over Christmas break were articles inspired by newspaper stories or the lives of artists and patients, and others were drawings or pieces of creative writing. At first none of them seemed to fit together, but soon subtle themes began emerging that connected some of the pieces – for example, using metaphors or imagery to create comparisons or humour between medical and non-medical subjects. This really helped to reveal what interested me and went on to inform my dissertation that year.

However, there were challenging parts to creating the journal, too… and not just the mad rush cutting and gluing in things the night before the deadline! In other University assignments I have always felt anonymous: essays are handed in with only a student number marking my identity. But now, I was being assessed not only as myself, but by submitting a piece of work which had grown very personal to me.

This was most obvious on the day we showed each other our work. The six of us sat nervously with our journals, not wanting to be the first to open the cover. However, once we started sharing our ideas, we quickly began to enjoy talking about our journals and appreciating the different styles and themes. I found this day one of the most memorable of our course. We all learned a huge amount from each other, ranging from creative ideas and personal stories to academic papers and book recommendations.

Alice’s journal contains a wide variety of topics, photographs, clippings, reflections, poems, drawings, paintings, quotes, lists, re-writings, collages, illustrations, and analysis. While the examples below are visually compelling in themselves, they are also worth reading in more detail:

Alice Ryrie, Virus, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Louise Bourgeois, Art Therapy and the Stream of Unconsciousness, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Edvard Munch – Illness & Art, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Facial Symmetry & Health, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Homophobia and Blood Donation, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Homophobia & Blood Donation, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, “I smoke for my mental health” – why David Hockney is fighting against anti-smoking campaigns, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Public Health Problems, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Masectomy, Breast Cancer & Narratives, 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Mastectomy, Breast Cancer & Narratives (1), 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, Mastectomy, Breast Cancer & Narratives (2), 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, The Nightshade Alkaloids (1), 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, The Nightshade Alkaloids (2), 2014/15

Alice Ryrie, A day in the life of a medical student…, 2014/15

The journal offered me a way to explore the diversity of medical humanities whilst discovering about my own interests along the way.

Five Questions for… Cordelia Warr

June 21, 2016June 21, 2016 / mendtjones / Leave a comment

In the second interview for our Meet the MedHumLab Members series, Dr Cordelia Warr, Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Studies and currently Head of Subject, tells us about her research on wounds in the Middle Ages and her love of campanology (church bell-ringing).

Cordelia and colleagues ringing the bells of St Oswald's Parish Church in Oswestry, Shropshire

Cordelia and fellow campanologists ringing the bells of St Oswald’s Parish Church in Oswestry, Shropshire

How do your research and teaching interests play into the field of medical humanities?

Cordelia Warr and Anne Kirkham (eds), Wounds in the Middle Ages, Ashgate, 2014

For a long time, I’ve been interested in miraculous wounds in the period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and particularly in holy men and women who were alleged to have received stigmata, miraculous wounds associated with those Christ received during the passion. If you’re going to think about miraculous wounds then the next thing is to think about what makes them different to non-miraculous wounds and this led me to an exploration of depictions of wounds and intentional wounding, for example during surgical operations. I’m interested in how images are used to convey information related to medical conditions and medical intervention, and what sort of information is considered important or appropriate. I’ve been fortunate to have been able to work with Elizabeth Toon and Sarah Collins on the MSc course in Medical Humanities and benefit from the input of students on that course who have previously trained in science-based disciplines. Seeing how students from humanities and science disciplines respond to historical images of wounds and surgery has helped to shape some of the questions I’ve been asking in my research.

How would you describe the term ‘medical humanities’ from your disciplinary perspective as an art historian?

As an art historian, the term ‘medical humanities’ is one which prompts me to look at images relating to medical issues from viewpoints outside those which privilege the acquisition of up-to-date medical knowledge and ask questions about the perceived purpose of images or the way in which knowledge is disseminated through visual material. For example, what do images of so-called monstrous births tell us about how people in the sixteenth century dealt with physical abnormalities? What does the depiction of the patient tell us about the way in which patients and medical professionals interacted in the early modern period? How do text and image interact? Visual images are incredibly complex and fascinating repositories of information – and not always the information you are expecting to find.

Plate 3 from Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s De Curtorum Chirurgia, 1597

Where do you see the potential of an interdisciplinary, cross-faculty network such as MedHumLab? And are there any challenges?

MedHumLab gives academics and practitioners from across the University the opportunity to learn from one another in a supportive environment. The great advantage of a network like MedHumLab is that it can spark exciting new research. The launch event in November 2015 in the Whitworth was inspirational because there were participants from so many different backgrounds talking about their work and their interests and coming up with new ideas. The challenge is to maintain that energizing diversity whilst facilitating cross-faculty work.

You have recently been awarded, with Carsten Timmermann, a University of Manchester Research Institute Pump Priming grant to develop the activities of the network and fund a series of events. Where could MedHumLab be headed in the future?

The sky’s the limit! The next event on Bodies, Objects, Technologies will be held at the Whitworth on 6 September and our plenary speaker will be Dr Sam Alberti, Keeper of Science and Technology, National Museums, Scotland. We hope that these events will help bring together people across the University and that, with the support of the University Pump Priming funding, MedHumLab will foster great interdisciplinary research which will have real impact.

And finally, how do you relax and unwind away from the office or seminar room?

Cordelia bell-ringing in Oswestry

I am a keen church bell-ringer (campanologist) and that takes up most of my weekends. I’ve been ringing since I was eleven years old. It’s been a great way to meet new people as I moved around a lot while I was studying and during my first years in academic posts. Bell-ringers are very friendly people and always welcome a fellow enthusiast. There are normally lots of social events. Bell-ringing is good exercise but with added ‘brain work’ built in. You really have to concentrate to make sure that the methods (not tunes!) sound right. In the last couple of years I’ve started to do more conducting and I really enjoy working on that. You can’t think about anything else while you’re conducting a method so you completely forget the stresses of the week.

Five Questions for… Carsten Timmermann

June 6, 2016June 7, 2016 / mendtjones / Leave a comment

We are kicking off our blog series Meet the MedHumLab Members with co-founder Dr Carsten Timmermann, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and passionate cyclist in his spare time. Questions by Marion Endt-Jones.

Carsten is a member of UMBUG, the University of Manchester’s Bicycle Users’ Group

You co-founded MedHumLab with Dr Elizabeth Toon in 2015. Can you tell us a bit more about your reasons for initiating a medical humanities research network in Manchester?

At the roots of this network was our interdisciplinary MSc course in Medical Humanities, developed and launched by Elizabeth and Sarah Collins in 2012. Sarah had been introduced to us by a colleague in the medical school, and we realized quickly that our interests overlapped. Sarah runs the Consultation Skills Learning Centre at the Manchester Medical School. She has found that medical students are often keen on the arts and would like to see more humanities teaching included in their curriculum, so she organizes a series of successful music, literature and arts events with performances by students.

When we put together the MSc course, we discovered that a number of colleagues across campus were interested in matters of health and medicine: in history, literature, the social sciences, or as explored in the visual arts or music. Many of them now contribute to the MSc, which is truly interdisciplinary and quite unusual. This is not always easy in a University designed around traditional faculties and disciplines. These colleagues were the original members of the network, and we’re hoping to reach out to others – possibly with a view to future joint projects. It’s not easy to launch projects across faculty boundaries, and an important goal of the network is to find ways of facilitating this for our field.

The actual trigger, however, was an email from Tim Harrison, the Creative Director of Sick! Festival. He was planning this spring’s Sick! Lab event, was looking for people to talk to in Manchester, and had come across our course website by chance. There must be more straight-forward ways of creating visibility for this exciting, interdisciplinary field of inquiry, Elizabeth and I thought, and started planning the launch of this network. The pump priming grant we’ve been awarded by the University of Manchester Research Institute helps immensely, of course.

How do your own research interests play into the field of medical humanities?

I’m a historian of medicine, and I feel that history is absolutely fundamental to all work in the medical humanities. I believe, for example, that you cannot say anything meaningful about the ways in which a novel or a painting engages with illness if you don’t understand the historical contexts of its production, or those that informed its reception. On the other hand, paintings and novels can be great sources for historians, and my interest in this network partly derives from a desire to find better ways of incorporating such sources in my historical work. Also, I started my career as a social science and humanities scholar with a Joint MA in History and Social Anthropology of Science, Technology and Medicine (my first degree was in Biochemistry). While my PhD project was very much social history, I find myself more and more attracted to anthropological approaches to health, sickness and medicine. My selfish hope is that the network will make it easier for me to pursue such interests.

Carsten Timmermann, A History of Lung Cancer: The Recalcitrant Disease, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014

How would you explain what medical humanities are to a layperson?

This is tricky. There are good reasons for the vagueness of the definitions in the literature, and medical humanities mean different things to different people. But I guess most of it comes down to engaging with illness experiences through art or studying the institutions dealing with illness through humanities and social science methods. The ideal, to me, are interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and historians, literary scholars and musicians, or anthropologists and museum specialists – and that’s where I hope this network can help. It brings together people who take all sorts of scholarly and artistic approaches to questions of health and medicine.

What’s your vision for MedHumLab for the next few months (and in the long run)?

My personal hope is that we turn this network into a foundation for productive conversations, which ultimately lead to joint projects. I don’t know how others feel about this, but to me working solely with colleagues in my own discipline can occasionally get a bit stale. Interdisciplinarity can be challenging, but much of the time it’s refreshing.

We are planning a couple of showcase events in late summer and early autumn that we hope will bring people together around topics of shared interest: one will be on Bodies, Objects, Technologies (featuring, for example, our Museum of Medicine and Health), and the second will deal with Narratives, Lives, Disruptions. We’re also working on a medical humanities interest directory, which will make networking much easier in the future.

And finally, what do you do to relax and unwind away from the office or seminar room?

I have two young boys, eight and five years old, and most weekends are dedicated to them: on Friday evenings we meet with friends in the pub, on Saturdays we go swimming, and on Sundays we often undertake little family cycling trips (the five-year old rides on the stoker seat of a tandem). Ask me again in a few years: the empty nest syndrome may force me to take up hobbies. But I also quite enjoy the rare moments when I can simply stare out of the window, let my mind wander, and do absolutely nothing.

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