How does the use of digital consulting change the meaning of being a patient and/or a health professional? Lessons from the Long-term Conditions Young People Networked Communication study.

Background: While studies have examined the impact of digital communication technology on healthcare, there is little exploration of how new models of digital care change the roles and identities of the health professional and patient. The purpose of the current study is to generate multidisciplinary reflections and questions around the use of digital consulting and the way it changes the meaning of being a patient and/or a health professional.

Method: We used a large pre-existing qualitative dataset from the Long-term Conditions Young People Networked Communication (LYNC) study which involved interviews with healthcare professionals and a group of 16-24 years patients with long-term physical and mental health conditions.

A Historical View on Health Care: A New View on Austerity?

It is an axiom of contemporary conversations about austerity and health care that the relationship between the two is essentially direct. Cutting funds damages health care systems and hurts the health of individuals who rely on them. Though this premise has provoked necessary discussion about global politics, the global economy and their impact on individual well-being, it is nonetheless intrinsically problematic.

'Items for criticism (not in sequence)': Joseph DeLee, Pare Lorentz and The Fight for Life (1940).

In the late 1920s, the American obstetrician Joseph DeLee brought the motion-picture camera into the birth room. Following that era's trend of adapting industrial efficiency practices for medical environments, DeLee's films give spectacular and unexpected expression to the engineering concept of 'streamlining'. Accomplishing what more tangible obstetric streamlining practices had failed to, DeLee's cameras, and his post-production manipulation, shifted birth from messy and dangerous to rationalized, efficient, death-defying.

The Autobiographical of Ernest Amory Codman: Crafting Medical Meaning in the Twentieth Century.

This essay offers a reconsideration of the historical significance of Ernest Amory Codman's autobiographical preface to his 1934 text The Shoulder, Rupture of the Supraspinatus Tendon and Other Lesions on or about the Subacromial Bursa and its reception, in its own time and at the end of the twentieth century. It concentrates on the aesthetics of identity and the ways in which these are woven into the political, professional, and cultural contexts of these two periods. It argues finally that Codman's style of life writing, both in the autobiography and throughout his texts, served as an important historical actor that more generally demonstrates the possibilities in approaching the history of medicine from aesthetic angles.