Beyond ‘born not made’: challenging character, emotions and professionalism in undergraduate medical education

In this article we explore the historical antecedents and ongoing perpetuation of the idea that medical professionals must adhere to a specific ‘character’. In the late nineteenth century, an ideal of the medical student as ‘born not made’ was substantiated through medical school opening addresses and other medical literature. An understanding prevailed that students would have a natural inclination that would suit them to medical work, which was predicated on class structures. As we move into the twentieth-century context, we see that such underpinnings remained, even if the idea of ‘character’ becomes ‘characteristics’. This was articulated through emerging psychological and sociological perspectives on education, as well as medical school admission processes. The significance ascribed to character and characteristics-based suitability continues to exclude and limits who can access medical careers. In the final part of the article, we argue that a framework of uncertainty can and should be mobilised to re-evaluate the role of doctors’ education and critique long-standing notions of professional identity, via the integration of medical humanities and clearer professionalism teaching within medical curricula

Creative forms: booklets by the hospital senses collective.

This article details the creation of a series of booklets designed to explore sensory encounters with hospitals and healthcare environments. The booklets were devised as a series of prompts or provocations, created to attend to and examine embodied, sensory encounters with health/care settings rather than to present research findings. Bringing together an expansive range of backgrounds and skill sets the booklets were created to sit within and beyond language through their design, form and content. Within this article we share the ways in which the works are deliberately unfinished and exploratory as this necessitates that those interacting with them create their own meanings and explore how they think and feel about health/care environments. The form and design promote a certain attentiveness and embodied engagement. For example, users must engage with the works carefully, gently turning and unfurling the fragile pages. This is further illustrated through qualitative insights collected from users of the booklets. Throughout this paper we argue for multiplicity in the ways in which we explore and present sensory-focused research. Our attention to multiplicity is supported not only through the design, form and content of the physical booklets but through the creative audio description, text and images created to complement and support these works. These are available online to ensure that our provocations are widely accessible. Within this paper we critique how a reliance on narrative form can limit the ways in which we engage with spatial, sensory and emotional concepts. Such concepts are by their very nature challenging to articulate and arguably require more-than-text-based approaches. We propose that embracing creative, exploratory and seemingly risky routes to examining and presenting such concepts is critical in expanding research. [Abstract copyright: © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.

Somatic, Sensuous, and Spatial Geographies in First World War Medical Caregiving Narratives

Military-medical personnel have a uniquely complex perspective and experience. The medic, whether in the capacity of doctor, nurse, or ambulance driver, is vulnerable, both vicariously and directly, to the effects of extreme physical and psychological harm, as well as inherently involved in alleviating, but also intensifying, pain and trauma. This thesis explores the representation of such caregiving experiences in first-hand life-writing, focusing primarily on memoirs, diaries, and semi-novelisations. By exploring the experiences of doctors, nurses, stretcher bearers, orderlies, and ambulance drivers, and crucially the ways they represent those experiences, this thesis explores the complexities that accompany both the experience and the attempt to articulate and communicate it. The intensity of the experiences is manifest in their representations, their hypersensitivity to the literal and figurative qualities of their sensory environment, and the somatic and spatial disorientation that accompanies the crisis situations of care. Very little attention has been given to space and medicine in the First World War context; existing scholarship dwells upon the metaphor and analogy of ‘No Man’s Land’ to explain the medics’ experience, with relatively little further scrutiny. This thesis develops from an initial premise that liminality is only one of the spatial characteristics of the medic’s experience under conditions of war, and this research is thus conceptually informed by a richer array of spatial concepts. There is much that attention to spatial contexts can tell us about the embodied experience of medics, how they relate to both environment and other bodies, as well as the affective dimension of their experience of trauma, and of the coping strategies they develop. This thesis situates military-medical writings within the wider context of war literature and the literature of medicine, and makes a contribution to critical medical humanities scholarship

Beyond 'born not made':Challenging character, emotions and professionalism in undergraduate medical education

In this article we explore the historical antecedents and ongoing perpetuation of the idea that medical professionals must adhere to a specific ‘character’. In the late nineteenth century, an ideal of the medical student as ‘born not made’ was substantiated through medical school opening addresses and other medical literature. An understanding prevailed that students would have a natural inclination that would suit them to medical work, which was predicated on class structures. As we move into the twentieth-century context, we see that such underpinnings remained, even if the idea of ‘character’ becomes ‘characteristics’. This was articulated through emerging psychological and sociological perspectives on education, as well as medical school admission processes. The significance ascribed to character and characteristics-based suitability continues to exclude and limits who can access medical careers. In the final part of the article, we argue that a framework of uncertainty can and should be mobilised to re-evaluate the role of doctors’ education and critique long-standing notions of professional identity, via the integration of medical humanities and clearer professionalism teaching within medical curricula

The association between social media use and mental health symptoms in middle adolescence: A counterfactual analysis

The current study will employ propensity score analysis, a process that simulates a case-control study by creating matched groups that differ in group status (e.g., spending a lot of time or frequently using social media screen) but that are statistically equivalent on their estimated tendency to have high levels of screen time. We will use data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), which is a large, nationally representative sample of a cohort of youth in the United Kingdom. The effect of frenquency of social media screen use at age 11 on adolescents’ mental health symptoms (including emotional symptoms, self-harm) at age 14 will be examined. And, the effect of time spent on social media websites/apps at age 14 on adolescents’ mental health symptoms (including emotional symptoms, self-harm, and suicide attempts) at age 17 will be examined