'Making the Invisible Visible': an audience response to an art installation representing the complexity of congenital heart disease and heart transplantation

When Epidemic Outbreaks Meet Social Media: Collective Illness Narratives on WeChat During COVID-19 Omicron Infection in China

This study investigates the landscape of collective illness narratives on social media in China during December 2022 and January 2023, when nearly one billion people were infected with the COVID-19 Omicron virus. By analyzing 655 private social media posts, conducting in-depth interviews with 50 individuals, and organizing 6 focus group discussions with 24 participants, this study explores how COVID-19 Omicron infection became normalized and widely discussed on private social media platforms, notably WeChat Moments. This study unveils distinct features that arise when illness narratives and social media intersect and reveals how people exercised moral imagination and depathologized perception in social media illness narratives. The article provides narrative dynamics during the pandemic in a collective manner and sheds light on the reshaping of illness narratives in the era of social media, offering insights for future pandemic responses.

Interdisciplinarity and Patient Engagement: New Representations of Cardiovascular Anatomy

Background

This article presents and discusses the genesis, making and public presentation of two artworks by British artist Sofie Layton, namely Blueprints and The Bud, which explore the anatomy of the heart infusing it with experiential and narrative elements.

Methods

Artist-led workshops with a range of audiences (cardiac patients, medical staff, medical students, creative professionals, and patient relatives) led to explore narratives and imagery that, in turn, was re-presented in artworks exploring the complexity of the cardiovascular system.

Results

While positioning themselves in a long tradition of artistic representations of the heart, often purely anatomical or autobiographical, these artworks stem from a process of patient involvement and participation. Integral to the pieces is an interdisciplinary approach, which is central to arts-and-health collaborations.

Conclusions

At a time in which the role of the arts in improving health and wellbeing is increasingly recognised and supported by evidence, these artworks offer an opportunity to reflect not only on ways of representing cardiovascular anatomy, but also on its experiential value and on the important of patient engagement and involvement.

Psychosocial curating: a theory and practice of exhibition-making at the intersection between health and aesthetics

A recent Manifesto for a Visual Medical Humanities suggested that more in-depth analysis of the contribution of visual art to medical humanities is urgently required. This need perhaps arises because artists and curators experience conflict between the experimental approaches and tacit knowledge that drive their practice and existing audience research methods used in visitor studies or arts marketing. In this paper, I adopt an innovative psychosocial method-uniquely suited to evidencing aesthetic experiences-to examine how an exhibition of my own curation facilitated audiences to undertake psychological processing of complex ideas about mental distress. I consider the curator working in a health context as a creator of care-driven environments where complex affects prompted by aesthetic approaches to illness can be digested and processed. My definition of care is informed by psychosocial studies and object relations psychoanalysis, which allows me to approach my exhibitions as supportive structures that enable a spectrum of affects and emotions to be encountered. The key argument of the paper is that concepts from object relations psychoanalysis can help to rethink the point of entanglement between curating and health as a process of preparing the ground for audiences to do generative psychological work with images and affects. The case study is Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age, an exhibition that was iterated at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), UK and University of New South Wales Galleries Sydney, with an emphasis on audience response to key artworks such as Madlove-A Designer Asylum (2015) by the vacuum cleaner and Hannah Hull. It is hoped that this paper will help to reaffirm the significance of curating as a cultural platform that supports communities to live with the anxieties prompted by society's most complex medical and social issues.

Latest developments in post-mortem foetal imaging

A sustained decline in parental consent rates for perinatal autopsies has driven the development of less-invasive methods for death investigation. A wide variety of imaging modalities have been developed for this purpose and include post-mortem whole body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, computed tomography (CT) and micro-focus CT techniques. These are also vital for "minimally invasive" methods, which include potential for tissue sampling, such as image guidance for targeted biopsies and laparoscopic-assisted techniques. In this article, we address the range of imaging techniques currently in clinical practice and those under development. Significant advances in high-field MRI and micro-focus CT imaging show particular promise for smaller and earlier gestation foetuses. We also review how MRI biomarkers such as diffusion-weighted imaging and organ volumetric analysis may aid diagnosis and image interpretation in the absence of autopsy data. Three-dimensional printing and augmented reality may help make imaging findings more accessible to parents, colleagues and trainees.