About Us

Jennifer Patterson is the current elected President of the Association for Medical Humanities.

I am an interdisciplinary feminist critical theorist with a doctoral research background in radical embodied readings of 20th Century French Surrealist literature and art history from UCL, London. Following time in business and journalism, I am now a part-time Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Health and Human Sciences at the University of Greenwich and a practicing Complementary Therapist of over 15 years. I currently teach professional health and education doctoral students. Since 2006, I have led a significant number of externally funded research and enterprise projects and published several peer reviewed journal articles and chapters in books. I see writing as activism, often based on experience, related to equity, rights and social justice, questioning cultural and ethical assumptions. I like to write about different things and use an interdisciplinary toolbox of applied feminist theory, applied sociology with creative use of linguistic visual and verbal methods such as discourse analysis and narrative analysis. My research and publishing uses theory to question and disrupt topics and normative assumptions in two key interdisciplinary areas: the Medical/Health Humanities and Sustainability Education. Latterly these combine in a focus on sustainable health with particular reference to women’s life-course events, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and menstrual hygiene practices, and thinking with and without a uterus. I am interested in the practical application of research projects I am involved in and have written on impact and been nominated for impact awards. For many years I was a visiting lecturer on the MA in Women’s Studies at Ruskin College, Oxford. I have also worked as an editor and translator outside of academia and have trained in Narrative medicine with Rita Charon in New York. I continue to work on the Listening to Patients’ Project and published the edited book Body Talk in Medical Humanities with Francia Kinchington in 2019.

Jo Winning is Reader in Modern Literature and Critical Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities and Programme Director of Birkbeck's MA Applied Medical Humanities and MPhil/PhD Medical Humanities programmes. Jo's teaching and research focus particularly on the interface between critical theory, clinical practice and patient experience, locating the ways that the epistemologies and methodologies of the humanities disciplines are intrinsic to the training and practice of medicine.

Linda is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton with a MA(Ed) in Literature and Language in Education. She introduced Medical Humanities into year 1 of the BM curriculum in 2008 as a mandatory module and leads an interdisciplinary staff group that teaches options in art, drama, music, creative writing, film and cultural studies to medical students. She has 25 years’ experience of innovative curriculum design and delivery in further and higher education and her own speciality is literature and narrative in medicine. She has presented papers nationally and internationally on curriculum delivery, teaching and learning and Medical Humanities and has supervised research projects in these areas.

Linda organised and hosted the AMH 2014 conference, ‘The Art of Compassion’, at Southampton and has co-curated two Medical Humanities exhibitions (2011 & 2014) at the Hartley Level 4 Gallery, Southampton, featuring work created by students and artists exploring experiences of health and illness.

Bridget MacDonald is a consultant neurologist working between Croydon University and St George's Hospitals in South West London. She has a rather eclectic interest in medical humanities in addition to postgraduate medical education. Her clinical interests are the practice of general neurology, epilepsy, learning disability and brain tumours.

Aatqa is a medical student at the University of Cambridge in the 5th year of her studies. She has a keen interest in using the medical humanities to enhance clinical encounters. Her academic interests lie in the interactions between landscapes and human health. She wrote an undergraduate dissertation titled Therapeutic Landscapes in John Armstrong’s ‘The Art of Preserving Health’ (1744) within the department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge and has had a feature piece published in the Cambridge University Science Magazine BlueSci Easter 2024 edition titled Medicine through the Seasons. She has been a committee member for the Cambridge University Medical Humanities Society throughout her degree and currently leads the group through her role as president. As part of this she runs regular writing groups for student from medical and non-medical backgrounds and has worked with universities in London to organise an interuniversity Medical Humanities student conference. In her free time, she can be found with her head in a book, or at the Lido enjoying a cold dip with friends!

Originally trained as an archaeologist and historian, I chose my third subject, English Literature, to start my career as a teacher in an inner-city comprehensive school. Somehow, I subsequently became a senior civil servant at the Department of Education and Science and then Head of Continuing Vocational Education at the University of Warwick, before becoming Professor of Postgraduate Medical Education at the University of London and Head of Education at NHS Kent, Surrey and Sussex Regional Postgraduate Medical Deanery in 1993. A former co-Chair of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Doctors and Dentists [GLADD], in 1994 I co-founded with Dr Lynne Jones MP the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity, which continues to meet. My interest is in the ways in which the complex, messy, everyday world of clinical practice can be illuminated by transdisciplinary working and the benefits for social justice which that can produce. I am now the Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London, and am currently completing my debut mass-market book, a trans social history entitled The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, for publication in 2020 by Bloomsbury (UK) and Scribner (US). If you would like to see examples of my work, it can be found at www.zoeplaydon.com

Angela is an artist and researcher at the University of the Arts London, where she is in the final stages of a collaborative, socially engaged doctoral study Drawing on the Nature of Empathy.

Her research focused on the benefits (and complications) of drawing within a multi-ethnic series of hospital communities in South East London, where she was a consultant microbiologist and college tutor for many years. Drawing was used to touch the craft skills of medicine, explore emotions and thoughts, referencing the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in the late 1960s and 70s. Special study modules in Medical Humanities, with final year medical students, fed into the research.

Dr Joanne 'Bob’ Whalley's artistic-research interests are embedded in performance, namely critical-spatial practices; dramaturgy; performance art and durational performance; spectatorship and practices of audiencing; performance and medicine; personal narrative and grief in performance. Throughout the course of her twenty-plus year academic career, She remains committed to inter-, cross-, trans-, and multi- disciplinary approaches, and has collaborated with choreographers, clinicians, musicians, photographers and architects. She is currently a Lecturer in Dance and Course Leader for MRes Choreography & Performance at University of Roehampton UK, and considers herself to be an artivist (artist + activist) teacher with a student-centred practice. Her first book 'Between Us: Audiences, Affect and the In-Between’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) celebrates spaces which cause an affecting, and bodies affected. She completed the first joint practice-as-research Ph.D. in 2004, and with her research partner creates performance, installations, performance text and objects for international audiences. Her Ph.D. students explore concepts of with-ness and witness in performance through auto/biography, grief narratives, ‘patienting’, empathy and affective exchange.

I am a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, still working full time for the NHS, and senior lecturer and lead tutor for medical humanities at the University of Keele medical school. I have an open university degree in the history of art and a masters degree in medical education, my dissertation being on medical humanities. I, and my unpaid team, organise and run courses in medical humanities for year 3 medical students undertaking humanities student selected components. We have attempted to broaden out contact with the humanities to all medical students and have created a literature and poetry website (keelebooksoflife.com), and we have also curated and published a poetry book specifically for year 1 students starting their medical education. There is much more we have done and we pushing forward with new ideas despite lack of funding

Dr Ciara Breathnach is Associate Professor in History at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and an Irish Research Council Laureate Awardee. Her current research project entitled Death and Burial Data, 1864-1922 (2018-2022), focuses on historical Big Data, cause of death and the social determinants of health. She has published widely on Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history, and her monograph Ordinary lives, death and social class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902 is under contract and forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Breathnach will host the AMH conference at the University of Limerick, 2021.

ORCID 0000-0002-4065-0660

Dr Radha Bhat is a Consultant Psychiatrist who specialises in Child and Adolescent mental health. She qualified as a member of the Institute of Group Analysis. And has an interest in medical education, she is involved in medical education at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School in her role as an Honorary Senior clinical lecturer and as a post graduate examiner at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Her interests in Medical Humanities developed from her clinical practice as a child and adolescent psychiatrist applying systemic and psychodynamic thinking in understanding the complexities of clinical problems. In collaboration with Consultant Paediatricians she setup interdisciplinary teaching for trainee doctors in Paediatrics and General Practice. It had become apparent that doctors need training in Medical Humanities in order to practice a bio psycho social approach. She completed a Masters degree in medical education on the subject of Interdisciplinary education on teaching psychosocial aspects of medical problems. She is currently an MPhil student at Birkbeck College, London and in the process of writing up her thesis on the subject of Medical apprenticeship.

Currently a Journal Launch Specialist at Frontiers Open Science Journal, my research centres on institutional and mental health care histories. I was elected onto the Association for Medical Humanities in early 2022. I completed my PhD in Psychiatric History at University of Limerick in 2020. I was then appointed Post-Doctoral Researcher at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, Child and Family Research Centre at National University of Ireland, Galway. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, I worked on a survivor-led project that examined language, terminology and representation of those directly affected by ‘Mother and Baby Homes’, ‘County Homes’, and related institutions.

I was awarded the Royal College of Physicians’ Ireland History of Medicine Research Award in 2018 for my work on the patients of St. Joseph’s Psychiatric Hospital. I am currently co-editing a collection titled ‘Institutions in Irish history: A methodological review’ (2023) and have numerous articles and book chapters published including the Journal for Irish Labour history Society and the Journal of the Society for the study of Nineteenth Century Ireland. I have organised and co-organised many national and international conferences including the ‘Prisons, Asylums and Workhouses: Institutions of Ireland’ (2019) and the ‘International Research Methods Summer School’ (2019 and 2022). In addition to being an elected member on the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences, I am on the senior advisory board for St. Brigid’s Psychiatric Hospital, Ballinasloe working together with local and national stakeholders in identifying future outcomes for the establishment.

I am a fourth-year medical student at the University of Cambridge, with a first-class BA in English. I have a keen interest in mental health and illness, with an eye to specialise in psychiatry in the distant future. My interest in the medical humanities lies primarily in literature, particularly narrative medicine, gender/queer studies and psychiatry/antipsychiatry. My BA dissertation was a Laingian study of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

Outside of my studies I enjoy reading, DJing, and playing classical piano.

I helped set up the student-led Cambridge University Medical Humanities Society and was its President from 2020-21. I am currently working on an arts-based qualitative research project on creative expressions of medical student experiences and am student representative in the AMH with Ananya. Together, we are leading student representation at the upcoming international AMH 2022 conference 'Fevers, Frets and Futures' convened with the IAS at UCL this September.

I was a GP Trainer in North London, combining clinical work with educating medical students and postgraduate doctors, with a particular interest in mental health. I was appointed Practice Tutor, Trainer’s Workshop convenor, Area educational facilitator, GP Appraiser, and Finals examiner at King’s College London. In 2008, I completed an MA in Literature and Medicine at KCL. I taught on Medical Humanities courses, wrote widely, and broadcast on radio and television. I was involved with community groups in North London, and helped to establish medical projects in Slovakia since 1991. In 2009, I was made a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

My involvement with the Association for Medical Humanities dates from 2006. I was elected to Council in 2010, and became Honorary Secretary between 2013 and 2017. Learning British Sign Language encouraged my research interest in the representation of deafness and deaf people in literature and film. My own explorations into Medical Humanities, and meeting others with similar interests, kept me grounded, motivated, and energised. I used literature and film to teach students, postgraduate doctors, and fellow GP Trainers, in a wide range of areas, but in particular the complex issues of fitness to practice and ethics.

Following retirement, I squeeze research and writing into my busy schedule of gym work, grandchild care, and language learning. I’m presently finishing an article on deaf superheroes, and like everyone else in possession of a keyboard, completing my first novel.

Publications include:
Book chapters
“Speech without Sound: Signing as ‘Body Talk’
“Through vast realms of air: The poetry of Francis St Vincent Morris” in Risk and Regulation at the Interface of Medicine and the Arts, ed. Alan Bleakley, Larry Lynch, Greg Whelan. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2017.
“A Red Nose, Floppy Hat, and the Arts: The Trainers’ Workshop” in Keeping Reflection Fresh, ed. Allan Peterkin and Pamela Brett-Maclean. Kent State University Press. 2016. 145-148.

Articles
“Sign gene: the first deaf superhero film”
https://hekint.org/2019/03/18/sign-gene-the-first-deaf-superhero-film/
“Francis St Vincent Morris: the pilot poet” Hektoen International Volume 9, Issue 4 – Fall 2017 ISSN 2155-3017
“A Cut Too Far? Cochlear Implants and Division among the Deaf”. JSM Health Educ
Prim Health Care 2(1): 1023. 2017.
“Sir Roderick Glossop: Wodehouse’s ‘eminent loony doctor’”
Hektoen International Summer 2017 9(3)
(reprinted in PG Wodehouse Society’s magazine Wooster Sauce in March 2019)
“Are we selling ourselves short?” BJGP Feb 2017 Vol 67 No 655, p75.
“Super heroes – special powers in deaf characters” Hektoen International Volume 8, Issue 2 - Spring 2016 ISSN 2155-3017
“Goldilocks or Granny?: Portrayals of deafness in the English novel”
J Med Biogr. 2015 Nov;23(4):227-37. doi: 10.1177/0967772013479477. Epub 2014 Jan 27..
“The awkward moment when your patient’s dog starts humping your leg”.
http://www.the guardian.com/healthcare-network/2015/nov/05/awkward-moment-patients-dog-starts-humping-leg
“John Wesley: amateur physician and health crusader”
Hektoen International 5(3) – Summer 2013,
“The drama of the consultation”
Leading article. Education for Primary Care (2012) 23: 311-2
“Interview with Dannie Abse”
Editorial. Medical Humanities December 2012 38(2) 65-6.
“Dr Henry Crawford MacBryan aka Sir Roderick Glossop”
Journal of Medical Biography Aug 2011: 19 (3), 110.
“Dr Winkel’s crucifix – moral ambiguity in The Third Man”
Clinical Medicine 2010: 10 (4) 1-2
(reprinted in A Sort of Newsletter; Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, Winter 2011)
“Literary portrayals of deafness”
Clinical Medicine 2009: 9 (3) 293-4
“Editorial: Welcome developments in UK medical humanities”
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 2009: 102: 84-85
Hurwitz, Dakin
“Brainwashing: the power of the psychiatrist portrayed in 1960s visual media”
Medical Humanities 2008: 34:80-83.
“Medicine and Literature – the Perfect Partnership?”
RCGP News, August 2008,5.

Book reviews

The Reading Room: 'Deaf Gain' - BMJ Blogs
blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2016/04/.../the-reading-room-deaf-gain...
8 Apr 2016 - Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, Editors University of Minnesota Press, 2014
“Medicinema: Doctors in Films”
Medical Humanities. December 2010 Volume 36 (2) 124,5.
“The Body and the Arts”
Medical Humanities. December 2009 Volume 35 (2) 125,6.