Following a day-long, company-wide “workplace culture” workshop for a Silicon Valley startup that creates and oversees mental health care chatbots (pseudonym: The Startup), I find myself sitting on…
Most of us probably feel well-schooled in the nature of respiratory viruses after a blistering global pandemic and frequent news items of the latest outbreak of another strain…
Ways of Being. Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence , by James Bridle (Penguin Books, 2023) If you read the cover of James Bridle’s book,…
The increased demand for distant cures amid heightened concerns about infection in healthcare facilities, coupled with the “great resignation” in medicine since the COVID pandemic, have together crea…
The Distance Cure and The Doctor Who Wasn’t There are political books about medical media. Zeavin offers illuminating analyses of a range of distant psychotherapies: epistolary analysis, telephonic…
“all new media deal in futures” -Jeremy Greene “automation is the dream of autonomy” -Hannah Zeavin It was at once an odd experience and an exhilarating one. Sitting…
Hanna Zeavin’s The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, and Jeremy A. Greene’s The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth, are both histories…
To read these two brilliant books side by side is an exhilarating experience—they not only offer new historical and theoretical insights into the role of media in clinical…
The origins of The Doctor Who Wasn’t There are inescapably tangled with The Distance Cure—tangled in cords of telephone wires. The telephone was both the subject and object…
Letters always, according to Lacan, reach their destination. We all write with others, even or especially when we sit down to make work that is classified as a…
In this forum, five scholars from different but intersecting fields of historical research engage with Hannah Zeavin and Jeremy Greene’s recent books on telehealth and telemedicine. As all…
The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media, by Bishnupriya Ghosh (Duke University Press, 2023) In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and with various forecasts predicting likelihoods of a…
Infertile Environments: Epigenetic Toxicology and the Reproductive Health of Chinese Men, by Janelle Lamoreaux (Duke University Press, 2023). The World Health Organization recently called to cente…
Introduction At present, we are living through several major, arguably foreseen, historical events and political shifts. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilised and further fragmented …
I had just begun my year of social service when I met a patient I will never forget. Let’s call her María. She was around 50 years old…
Introduction Contraceptives are considered ‘the greatest life-saving, poverty ending, women-empowering innovation ever created’ (Gates 2019, 18). ‘Family planners’ – the global constellation of bi…
Social medicine, an approach that centres the social conditions of life as the cause of health and illness, can be thought of as an effort to ‘resocialize’ medicine.…
This essay aims to explore possibilities and challenges for the future of Social Medicine.[1] It is inspired by empirical ethnographic research, as part of a PhD in Collective…
If you fall into a pit, you can climb out, but once you slip from a sheer cliff, you canno…
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Americans became familiar with the idea that people with underlying conditions were at increased risk for severe COVID infections.…
“Three men are constantly speaking to me behind my right ear,” says Pia Oxenvad, a young woman experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It feels like they are standing right behind…
In the final evening of an archival research trip across France last September, I was thrilled to see that a cinema in Quartier Latin was screening Atlantic City…
Though plants are indispensable for human survival, their contributions to human existence and history are often underappreciated. To underline some of the contributions of plants to wider environmen…
I start with the question, why was it necessary, from 2008, for Mondi South Africa to spend R50 million (USD 8 million) a year on a nutrition intervention…