ABSTRACT
The field of Medical Humanities, shaped by a belief in the vitality of interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical conversations across disciplines, would only be sustainable if both components of the field – ‘medical’ and ‘humanities’ were given equal validity and weightage. The challenge for any exploration of Medical Humanities within the medical curriculum would be to take seriously the methodology and scholarship of the Humanities and its millennia-rich study of health, illness, mortality and human wellbeing. While Humanities has to work within the parameters of medical education, there needs to be more clarity on how to locate and explore subjects from the Humanities in this educational process. The Medical Council of India has made various forays in engaging with the issue. While the previous regulations (1997, last updated in 2017) were non-committal and insufficiently specific, the new guidelines of 2018 do not contain a single inclusion of the word ‘Humanities’. Further, the only overture to all the non-medical components have been ossified under the umbrella of AETCOM (Attitude, Ethics and Communication) with prefabricated topics. Both curricular formulations are deeply inadequate: the earlier formulation was lost in vagueness, and the new is instrumental. This revised emphasis on capsules of information, rather than the epistemological approaches that have informed the interplay of Medicine and Humanities means the disappearing act of any possibility of a genuine engagement with the ethos of Medical Humanities. This article attempts to address this invisibility of the Humanities in contemporary formulations of medical syllabi and pedagogy in India
ABSTRACT
February 9, 2017. The alarm on my phone was set to a pre-dawn hour. We were to leave for a holiday in the hills, a long drive that I had planned for days, eager for hours of camaraderie with the steering wheel. But the waking was a shock. The walls and ceiling of the room were swirling, my body felt as if strapped to a rotating carnival wheel. Sitting, standing, walking, nothing eased it. I threw up from the nausea. Maybe it will slow, maybe it will stop, maybe it is nothing. It is vertigo, said my cousin (a doctor) on the phone, and prescribed an over-the-counter medication. The world steadied. I made the drive, the vacation, but the condition was now with me, for several hours each day.
ABSTRACT
This article examines the transferability of conversations in literary studies to a more sensitive, holistic, ethically informed, medical education. The article begins with a discussion of a class assignment on medical humanities in a literature course. The assignment enabled an immersive engagement with medical discourse by diverse students through different modes – through textual analysis, direct, and reflective encounters with communities of patients, caregivers, health professionals. The effort was to suggest that literature and medicine be studied as continuous shared strategies of reading and narrating lived experiences of health and illness. The insights of such learning should ideally be integral to the curriculum of medical students in India. Though the Medical Council of India’s mandate for the humanities is inadequately sketched out, it nevertheless provides an opportunity to demand a larger citizenship and broader base of social sensitivity and knowledge for medical humanities.
ABSTRACT
The testicular artery is frequently subjected to radiographic imaging techniques such as angiography for diagnosis and treatment of conditions like epididymitis, testicular torsion, tumor, hematoma, and hydrocele and in cases of undescended testis. Radiologists and surgeons should therefore be aware of testicular artery variants. Although there are numerous studies and case reports that mention testicular artery variants, this is probably the first case, reporting a bilateral low origin of the testicular artery and discussing its probable embryological etiology
A artéria testicular é frequentemente examinada por técnicas de imagem como angiografia, para o diagnóstico e tratamento de condições como epididimite, torsão testicular, tumor, hematoma e hidrocele, e também em casos de criptorquidia. Sendo assim, radiologistas e cirurgiões devem estar cientes de variantes anatômicas da artéria testicular. Embora numerosos estudos e relatos de caso mencionem variantes da artéria testicular, este provavelmente é o primeiro caso a descrever origem bilateral baixa da artéria testicular e a discutir sua provável etiologia embriológica