Delighted that my paper with Céline Lefève and Patrick ffrench comparing the history of the medical humanities in the USA and France is now out and free to download here:

doi.org/10.1177/0952...

@frenchstudies.bsky.social @frculturalst.bsky.social @oxmedhum.bsky.social @bmj.com

Tommy Robinson posted a neo-Nazi blog that accused me and my fellow Jews Jack Straw and Barbara Roche of conspiring to flood the UK with immigrants.

It sticks in the craw that you code opera as Tory though I know what you mean. But who are the opera lovers in the current shadow cabinet, or indeed on the front bench of any of the parties? Genuine question. I don't know the answer.

I’m talking about Don Trump, the New York cartoonist.

Ce que la maladie nous dit de notre rapport à l'autre « À la suite d’un AVC, un de mes amis, journaliste, n’a plus pu parler ni écrire un anglais clair. Il a tout perdu : son emploi, son mariage, son logement. Tous ses amis l’ont abandonné. Paradoxalemen...

I'm so grateful to Coline Garré of Le Quotidien du Médecin for this fab account (in French) of a seminar I was honoured to give at Institut la Personne en Médecine on how the isolation of the ill helps articulate the links between the medical humanities, psychology and epidemiology.
bit.ly/3TipqtQ

Baroness Kidron in the House of Lords today:

"It is extraordinary that the Government’s decided, immovable and strongly held position is that enforcing the law to prevent the theft of UK citizens’ property is unfair to the sector doing the stealing."

So kind of you Angela. Thanks so much!

Looking forward to the #NNMHR conference on ‘Medical Humanities across Linguistic and Cultural Frontiers’ beginning tomorrow. It’s a daunting honour to have been asked to give one of the keynotes. nnmh.org.uk/tongues/

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Delighted that my article on "The Narrative-Based Medical Humanities 1980-1995" is available to download free of charge from the journal, History of the Human Sciences. It's available here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Delighted that my article on "The Narrative-Based Medical Humanities 1980-1995" is available to download free of charge from the journal, History of the Human Sciences. It's available here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

📗📚📖 Pleased to have signed, with Co-Editor Larry Duffy, the contract for our book ‘French Studies and the Medical Humanities: Critical Intersections’, to appear in Liverpool UP’s Studies in Modern and Contemporary France series next year.

Excellent news!

One of the strangest ironies of the last ten years has been watching Britain immersing itself as deeply as ever in memories of WW2 while proudly turning its back on the project that emerged from it.

This is a really terrific piece.

Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment Book Review Jürgen Pieters reviews Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment by Neil Vickers and Derek Bolton (Reaktion, 2024).

I'm so delighted and thrilled by Jürgen Pieters' profound and perceptive review of my book (with Derek Bolton) Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment (Reaktion, 2024) in The Polyphony. You can read it here:
thepolyphony.org/2025/03/17/o...

it remains quite mad to me that this post was made over a decade ago - I remember seeing it at the time! - and it just got....pretty much everything about the online hellscape of 2020's right

2025: Brexit party MEP in court for taking bribes from Russia

2019: Brexit party MEP Claire Fox dismisses criticisms of 'foreign agents of Putin'

Your reminder that Fox who campaigned to leave the EU because of unelected bureaucrats is now sat in the House of Lords as an unelected legislator 🤷‍♂️

Excellent post with hard numbers about migration. Share if you care about equipping people with a swift robust response to this nonsense.

The abandonment of the sick The illness memoir is now a well-established literary genre. This phenomenon gives the subliminal impression that as a society, we are anxious to do away with taboos around sickness, and to support the sick. The truth, to our discredit, is that many people are keener on reading books about the illness of strangers than helping friends with major illness. The stigma of psychiatric illness is well-recognised, but that associated with physical illness much less so. In high-income countries, sick people and their families are in many respects socially isolated; even worse, society does not generally recognise this issue.

Delighted by this perceptive and very generous review of my book (with Derek Bolton), "Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment" in today's edition of @TheLancet. Read it here: bit.ly/4gKmDUg

Luigi Mangione in orange jumpsuit in the center of the frame, flanked by law enforcement officers, his hands are clasped and bound in front of him he looks off to the side pensively, seriously does this guy just not photograph poorly at all?

"Okay, get some snaps of that Mangione character, but you better not pull any bullshit where he looks like the subject in a 16th century painting called 'Christ taken at the Garden of Gethsemane'."
"Okay, now don't be mad but..."

I think this isn’t quite right. FF is more tied to the public sector, FG love tax cuts. The Soc Dems appear to be more ambitious to become the main opposition party in a way Lab never has been. They are also openly high tax and high spend.