@synapsisjournal

digital journal at the intersection of medicine, culture, and criticism || department without walls @Columbia || 🎨 by @JacSaorsa

 New York
medicalhealthhumanities.com
Joined January 2019
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Gilded rib cages, spine-shaped exoskeletons: does Schiaparelli's couture reveal the body or replace it? Trisha D. Gupta on anatomy, fashion, and the dress as a "second organism." medicalhealthhumanities.com/… #medicalhumanities

Body Inside a Body: Couture and the Unstable Anatomical Boundaries of Dress - S Y N A P S I S

           Elsa Schiaparelli (1890 – 1973) was as much an artist as she was an anatomist. By this, I do not mean to contend that her experience lay in the meticulous work of anatomy labs or dissect...

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Bruce Conner's CROSSROADS turns 50. Justin Huwe on watching a nuclear blast repeat on screen, and what the film teaches us about trauma and bearing witness in an age of constant footage. medicalhealthhumanities.com/… #medicalhumanities

At a crossroads: Trauma and technology in Bruce Conner’s short film at 50 - S Y N A P S I S

Torn between wonder and horror, I stand before a towering projector screen as a mushroom cloud erupts over and over—and over and over and over. The sheer violence of this moment is jarring. It feels...

medicalhealthhumanities.com
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Syphilis is the only disease Richard Tennant Cooper painted twice for Henry Wellcome. Elizabeth Saubestre on what these ca. 1912 images say about vision, blame, and the female body. medicalhealthhumanities.com/… #medicalhumanities #arthistory

Detestable Contagions: Richard Tennant Cooper's Representations of Syphilis, ca. 1912 - S Y N A P S...

Girolamo Fracastoro’s sixteenth-century epic poem Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus tells the story of a shepherd who was stricken with a particularly unpleasant condition after insulting the sun god...

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"I apologize for my body." Caroline Hensley reads Samantha Irby's essay "Hysterical!" and asks who cleans up after our bodies, and why that care work stays invisible. medicalhealthhumanities.com/… #medicalhumanities #careethics

Bloodstains and Bedclothes: Gendered Labor and Embodiment in Samantha Irby's "Hysterical!" - S Y N...

Samantha Irby leaves a stack of cash for the hotel employees next to a note that reads “I apologize for my body.”

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When is not knowing a plant a sign of being "enlightened"? Tianyuan Huang on botanist Shirai Mitsutarō and famine-relief flora in 1900s Japan, the second essay in our Plant Something series. medicalhealthhumanities.com/… #medicalhumanities

Plant Ignorance for "Enlightened Races": Shirai Mitsutarō (1863–1932) on Famine-Relief Flora - S Y...

How one evaluates ignorance is inseparable from what they regard as the condition for knowledge. At least, this was the case with Shirai Mitsutarō (1863–1932), whose contribution to the development...

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In King of Chinatown (1939), Anna May Wong plays a surgeon who moves between Western surgery and her father's herbal medicine. Jenelle Troxell and Megan M. Ferry on the film's vision of care. medicalhealthhumanities.com/… #medicalhumanities

Anna May Wong’s Bilingual Medical Modernity in King of Chinatown - S Y N A P S I S

After a long and difficult operation, a perioperative nurse removes the attending surgeon’s mask, dramatically revealing the composed, authoritative face of Anna May Wong. In Nick Grinde’s proto-noir...

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From Neanderthal remains to CRISPR: Maud Belair reviews Rod Flower's Drugs: The Story of Pharmacology, a sweeping history of how medicines work and who gets access to them. medicalhealthhumanities.com/… #medicalhumanities #historyofmedicine

Book Review: Drugs: The Story of Pharmacology by Rod Flower - S Y N A P S I S

In his new book Drugs: The Story of Pharmacology (Yale University Press, 2026), Rod Flower, Emeritus Professor of Biochemical Pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London, offers a grand-sweeping...

medicalhealthhumanities.com
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How do you love someone who is suffering? Pauline Picot reviews Judy Sandler's memoir What Kind of Mother, about raising a son with bipolar disorder through addiction and recovery. medicalhealthhumanities.com/… #medicalhumanities

"What Kind of Mother" by Judy Sandler: the beautiful, incomplete puzzle of life - S Y N A P S I S

"Addiction issues, mental illness, attempts at recovery, progress, setbacks: a mother tries to make sense of her son’s troubled life journey in light of her own history. Without sentimentality and...

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New review on Synapsis: Heather Glenny reads Lisa Jean Moore's The Unknowable Body, a feminist sociologist's account of becoming a patient and caregiver inside the medical system she spent decades critiquing. medicalhealthhumanities.com/… #medicalhumanities

Book Review: The Unknowable Body by Lisa Jean Moore - S Y N A P S I S

Moore, Lisa Jean. The Unknowable Body. Cambridge and Hoboken: Polity Press, 2026. 228pp.  Hardback, ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-7074-4.   In The Unknowable Body (Polity Press, 2026), Lisa Jean Moore asks...

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Nine new pieces are now up on Synapsis: Schiaparelli's anatomical couture, Anna May Wong as a 1930s surgeon, famine plants in Meiji Japan, syphilis in early-1900s art, Bruce Conner's CROSSROADS at 50, and more. Read them all: medicalhealthhumanities.com #medicalhumanities

Home - S Y N A P S I S

Synapsis: A health Humanities Journal. Our mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing, and we see ourselves as a “Department...

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Check out our new article!!! This essay asks us to reevaluate what immunity really means. Rather than seeing protection as seclusion from others, it looks at how care, connection, and interdependence sustain life.
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Another new post!! In "Relational and Intercultural Understandings of Schizophrenia in A Life on Hold," David Lombard delves into Josie MĂ©ndez-Negrete's memoir about her son's schizophrenia experience. Read the full piece on synapsis.
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Check it out!! Seon Shim investigates how Extraordinary Attorney Woo is reshaping disability media through care, community, and connection. Read it now on our website!!
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New article: In “A Monument of Charity,” historian Thomas F. Rzeznik traces the 161-year history of St. Vincent’s Hospital in NYC. Maud Belaire’s review explores how faith, medicine, and service shaped catholic hospitals.
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Check out the 13 new articles now available to read on synapsis!!
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New article up on SYNAPSIS! Ashley Moyse, Director of the Columbia Character Cooperatives, writes about the Cooperatives' mission, Jonathan Swift's vision of the bee, and imagining a future for medicine of mutuality, discernment, and care. Read it here: medicalhealthhumanities.com/…
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Two new articles up on SYNAPSIS this Friday! First, Jing Sun examines the year 1923, a critical moment in Japan-U.S. medical exchange in the years before WW2. How did American physicians regard their Japanese counterparts, and vice versa? Read it here: medicalhealthhumanities.com/…

When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part II) - S Y N A P S I S

Strategically designed to foster understanding and appreciation of American ideas and practice of medical science, the visit of the 1923 Japanese medical commission to a great extent defined “Ameri...

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Next up, Sarah Roth discusses recovery from a double mastectomy, and the crucial supportive role of queer media (like FX's Dying for Sex and Miranda July's novel All Fours) and communities in their processes of self-fashioning. Read it here! medicalhealthhumanities.com/…

Thresholds of the Body - S Y N A P S I S

This spring, when I was recovering from a double mastectomy, I consumed a lot of media. Propped up on a wedge pillow as family and friends filtered through with food and news of the world outside, I...

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New articles for the upcoming week from SYNAPSIS! Returning contributor Merve Şen writes on Ben Marcus's 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet, and examines practices of amateur medicine and DIY-self care in the midst of an unsettling pandemic. Read it here: medicalhealthhumanities.com/…

Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet - S Y N A P S I S

In the book, an epidemic disease—language toxicity—strikes most of the world, and the children’s speech becomes lethal for their parents.

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A busy week at SYNAPSIS! Two new articles up today: first from Kathryn West, a review of the recent edited volume How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (2025). West examines the included essays with a particular focus on emphasizing the disabled voices. medicalhealthhumanities.com/…
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Next, Emily Waples reviews the FX series "Dying for Sex," starring Michelle Williams. How does the show reflect current research on sex, illness, and dying, as well at the earlier podcast it was adapted from? Read it here: medicalhealthhumanities.com/…

Sex for the Dying: Palliative Kink and FX's Dying for Sex - S Y N A P S I S

“The aspects of death and sex are intimately intertwined for both are part of life,” begins a 1968 article in the Journal of Sex Research; “This applies for the normally healthy human being in...

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