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Parkinson's Disease – evident in other manifestations of neurology 11 – this chapter also explores an alternative, and equally ancient, narrative of balance about the dualism of creative genius. Roy Porter used William Blake's lament about the ‘mind forg'd manacles’ of the creative imagination to epitomise the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment's mirror of reason and madness. 12 My task here is to examine how balancing drug reception in the brain is bound to the
Edinburgh was disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS in the early
1980–1990s, and women and children were affected in higher numbers there
than elsewhere in the UK. Edinburgh’s AIDS crisis also followed a different
pattern, with new infections predominantly occurring among IV drug users and
heterosexuals. Because of the high rates of HIV infection among women in
Edinburgh, the city rapidly became host to numerous charities and
organisations scrambling to meet the needs of HIV-affected women and
families, aiming to prevent new infections and meet the emotional, medical,
housing, and educational needs of those already affected by the
virus.
This chapter traces how healthcare workers and HIV-affected women
responded in Edinburgh. This was interdisciplinary collaborative AIDS
activism born out of the daily fight for resources, information, space, and
empathetic treatment for women and their families. This activism can be
traced in texts both academic and creative, and was at the very least a
backdrop for many women’s experience of HIV and AIDS in Edinburgh in the
late twentieth century. To focus the analysis, the creation of the
Paediatric AIDS Resource Centre (PARC) in Edinburgh is examined, alongside
some of the items the centre published. The need for PARC is demonstrated
not just by placing it in its social, political, and historical context, but
by recovering the words of HIV-affected women and healthcare workers drawing
on its resources, writing these women back into the history they created as
subjects rather than objects.
month-long series of activities at the Dragon Café, a service user creative space in Southwark. In this chapter we explore the value and relevance of a combined academic and public engagement approach – to the Museum of the Mind and its users as well as to the history of medicine more generally. First, we consider the value of public engagement in the history of psychiatry, through discussion of the longer tradition and benefits of service user
as historians of medicine and disability. It is the implications of accessing, analysing and disseminating sensitive material generated by the patient voice that this chapter considers. In doing so, it contextualises and complicates the analysis in other chapters in this collection, particularly those of Houston and Hanley, in its consideration of the archival afterlife of stigma and its effect on how patients are heard by historians. Creative approaches not only enable access to historic patient experience but suggest ways in which patients and their agency are
Jaques's formulation of the midlife crisis emerged primarily from studying what he referred to as ‘a random sample’ of over 300 ‘creative artists’ – such as Mozart, Raphael, Rossini, Bach and Shakespeare – who had either died in their mid- to late thirties or whose work had changed radically in volume or mode of expression during that period of their lives. 5 Stimulated by contemporary interest in the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of ageing and death – evident in the emergence of geriatrics as a
outlined how understanding moral issues in secular and increasingly pluralist societies ‘required the creative meeting of all the relevant disciplines which are needed for an adequate appraisal of such problems’.86 Ramsey argued that the ethical issues that medicine and science raised were not novel, but now appeared ‘more complex’ in the absence of a common morality and obviously ‘correct’ answers. This ensured, he claimed, that it was ‘a mark of immaturity for any discipline to think it has ready-made, copy-book answers – whether that discipline is psychology, or
. 50 He suggested that these attempts to engage with reality could be investigated using psychological tests that measured children’s perception and self-awareness. Piaget was strongly influenced by Henri Bergson’s metaphysics, in particular Bergson’s Creative Evolution , which claimed that the theory of knowledge and the theory of life were inseparable. In
Russia into the minds of a western readership. No less than those of British writers such as Millicent Sutherland or Sarah Macnaughtan, Britnieva’s project was a patriotic one. For her western audience, Russia was another world – entirely out of reach – and Britnieva plays upon this notion of a ‘lost world’ by infusing her writing with a dreamlike quality. But this dream is both fantastic and utopian: and the Russia she creates owes as much to her own powerful and creative writing as to reality. Britnieva married at the beginning of 1918, ‘almost a year after the
be difficult to find in the nineteenth century, this is not to say that they did not exist or that they did not make themselves heard. Therefore, in order to recapture the full and inclusive picture of the medical past, we need to be critical and creative in finding and interpreting our sources, sometimes reasoning ‘against the grain’, sometimes even using silences in the
Written at a time when the second and third post-war generations 2 Introduction were evaluating the meaning of the conflict, Fussell’s book surveyed the landscape of the Great War from a vantage point beyond its most far-reaching ramifications, looking back across a historical landscape coloured by the Great Depression, the Second World War and the cultural freedom of the 1960s. Rather than attempting to recapture the mentality of the war generation, Fussell’s book produced a creative and imaginative reworking of his own generation’s reading of the Great War literary