Category Archives: Uncategorized

Two weeks ago I was in Quebec City for the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Health Humanities (CAHH) – “Creating Space” – this was the 13th conference. It was fully (well, ~90%) in-person after a hybrid return in Calgary in 2022 and it was buzzing! There were people from health professions, humanities disciplines – artists, academics,Continue reading “Creating Space 13”

“Nothing was deliveredAnd I tell this truth to youNot out of spite or angerBut simply because it’s true”Bob Dylan When I was a student nurse at St. Mary’s School of Nursing in Paddington, London in the mid-1980s, my female colleagues wore a traditional uniform. It was a blue and white dress, over which they woreContinue reading “Nursing and Tradition”

I. Simone Weil’s most famous essay is entitled “The Iliad or The Poem of Force,” written in the late 1930s and first published in December 1940 when France had been conquered by Nazi Germany. Weil admired Homer’s Iliad as “the purest and loveliest of mirrors” for its truthful depiction of “force” as a constant factorContinue reading “Simone Weil and “Prestige””

This post is a version of a talk I gave to a class of practising mental health and addictions nurses. I wanted to tie together some high-level ideas that affect how we think about mental health and mental health nursing practice. For that audience, I did not explicitly frame it as working with humanities, butContinue reading “It’s All in the Mind/Body”

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a powerful thinker of the 20th Century, who declared that philosophy, “(including problems of cognition[1], etc) is exclusively an affair of action and practice” (Weil, 2015, p. 362). She is often described as a mystic, which is at least partly true, as long as one remembers that mysticism can have a phenomenological intensity ofContinue reading “Simone Weil: A Thinker for Nursing”