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The patient voice in First World War medicine is a well-known concept. The emphasis on military patients over practitioners in many recent works has allowed historians to explore and unpack traditional biomedical understandings and hierarchies. Notable leading scholars like Mark Harrison have used the voices of patients to understand and critique past biomedicine. 1 Other historians, such as Ana Carden-Coyne and Fiona Reid, have explored the position of the patient within the political
Healthcare aims to be patient-centred but a large gap remains between the fine words and the reality. Care often feels designed for the convenience of the organisations that deliver it, and not enough around patients and their families, or even around the frontline staff who provide it. Why does this happen? What does it feel like? What can be done about it? This book stimulates reflection on these questions by listening closely to those at the frontline. It provides accounts from patients, carers and healthcare professionals who are patients about what it’s like when services get it right, and wrong, from birth up to the end of life. Quite simply, we want to draw upon the power of storytelling – which is increasingly valued as a tool for learning – to help policymakers and practitioners to understand how to deliver better care. We also hope to enlighten the general reader about how they might go about navigating “the system” while it remains imperfect. There is a growing literature of first-person accounts from patients and from healthcare professionals. This book differs by providing a collection of narratives of experiences of the NHS in England to paint a rich and varied picture. Alongside these narratives we provide some international context, and an overview of the history of moves towards a more patient-centred approach to care. We present the theory and practice of storytelling in the context of healthcare. We also seek to help the reader to draw out the practical learning from the individual accounts.
11 The patient’s view of work therapy: The mental hospital Hamburg-Langenhorn during the Weimar Republic Monika Ankele This chapter focuses on the Weimar period (1919–33) and the German mental hospital (Staatskrankenanstalt) Hamburg-Langenhorn. It examines the wider political and social factors that impacted on work therapy. My emphasis will be on how patients perceived their role as inmates, how they reacted to work therapy and how they dealt with an uncertain future on their discharge from the institution. I will argue that work therapy meant different things
2.1 When we are ill we want to be treated by competent doctors – that is why debates about regulation of the medical profession are so crucial. However, we may also wish to assert our own rights, especially in the context of decision-making. In the 2015 Supreme Court decision of Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board , 1 Lord Kerr and Lord Reed highlighted the effects of human rights discourse on the doctor–patient relationship: [P]atients are now widely regarded as persons holding rights, rather than as the passive recipients of the care of the medical
1 PSYCHIATRISTS AND THEIR PATIENTS: MIRRORED NARRATIVES OF SANITY AND MADNESS Roy Porter, whose work was pivotal in establishing the significance of patient perspectives to the history of madness, observed that psychiatrists and their patients often said ‘intriguingly comparable things about agency and action, rights and responsibility, reason and nonsense, although applying them in fundamentally reversed ways’.1 Porter’s observation informs my examination of the efforts made by psychiatrists and patients to address the public and challenge the stigma attached
If the success of In the Skin of a Lion helped Ondaatje secure an international audience for the first time, his next book The English Patient propelled him to world fame. The novel won the Booker Prize in 1992, an award Ondaatje shared with the British writer Barry Unsworth, guaranteeing him international celebrity and prestige. In the same year The English Patient also received the Canadian Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award. The novel’s appeal and popularity was reinforced by the appearance, in 1996, of Anthony
Thus far we have seen that war-injured patients do not use the hospital environment only to fix their bodies; they also attempt to reconstruct their emotional wellbeing and their sense of social identity. To fully understand the scope of the recovery they are seeking, we must have a closer look at their pasts, and at the events related to their injuries and the treatment
6 Patient autonomy and responsibilities within the patient–doctor partnership: two sides of the same unequal coin? Asim A. Sheikh Introduction The autonomous patient has the ability to engage with a healthcare provider in relation to his or her health on a wide range of issues. This ability and control are central to a patient’s autonomy and self-determination. This chapter will consider whether this ability confers both rights and responsibilities upon patients. It asks whether the language and idea of the healthcare provider and healthcare receiver (‘doctor–patient
Roy Porter's article ‘The Patient's View’ stimulated a major change in medical history. In many ways it defined the new social history of medicine, which since the 1970s had been challenging doctor-centred histories and opening new approaches and topics. Many historians took up Porter's invitation to rewrite medicine's past ‘from below’, but I argue in this chapter that they have not been radical enough and have missed one of his major challenges. The overlooked item is the last on his agenda for future research
It is almost thirty-five years since the publication of Roy Porter's ‘The Patient's View’. 1 Since then, the article has often been styled as ‘seminal’. It has a firm place in the historiography of ‘patient’ related historical study being ‘a modern day classic […] and virtually every chapter, article or monograph on medical practice published since 1985 seems to refer back to it’. 2 In essence, Porter was concerned that histories of medicine did