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Body image research focuses almost exclusively on women or overweight and obesity or both. Yet, body image concerns among thin men are common and can result, at least in part, from mixed messages in society around how men qua men should dress and behave in order to look good and feel good. Stand-alone interventions to meet these different messages tend to provide men with little therapeutic relief. This conceptual paper draws on literature from the medical humanities; gender and body image studies; the social psychology of clothing; and the author's own lived experience to address this contemporary problem. The paper embraces visual culture as a resource that can frame discussion of how two sets of 'performativity' might reduce male anxiety about thinness. First, thin men could choose repeatedly to wear masculine-looking clothing, which could create their masculinity as a personal aesthetic that strengthens the confidence to harness masculine traits in healthy ways. Secondly, health and allied health service providers could promote and reinforce such dress behavior by offering advice that integrates aesthetic and functional aspects of clothing. Empirical studies are needed to test this dual model of performativity.

Understandings of the relationship between space, culture and belief are formative in the experience of seeking healing. This paper examines the relationship between place, healing and spirituality in the context of interdisciplinary perspectives (particularly those of the medical humanities) on healing and well-being. The paper examines places of spiritual significance and their relationship to healing in the ‘uncertain’ quest for alleviation or cure, exploring these thematics in the context of the work on the geographies of ‘therapeutic landscapes.’ Through a discussion of fieldwork at two sites in Perthshire, Scotland, a framework is proposed for the investigation of therapeutic sites of spiritual significance, detailing features such as connection, renewal, reproduction, participation, alleviation and expectation. A deeper examination of sites of healing with spiritual significance, it is proposed, has the potential to develop greater understandings of the ways in which people experience illness and well-being.

peer-reviewed This paper explores the role of the curator in hospitals. The arts play a significantrole in every society; however, recent studies indicate a neglect of the aesthetic environment ofhealthcare. This international study explores the complex role of the curator in modernhospitals. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten arts specialists in hospitalsacross five countries and three continents for a qualitative, phenomenological study. Fivethemes arose from the data: (1) Patient involvement and influence on the arts programme inhospital (2) Understanding the role of the curator in hospital (3) Influences on arts programmingin hospital (4) Types of arts programmes (5) Limitations to effective curation in hospital.Recommendations arising from the research included recognition of the specialised role of thecurator in hospitals; building positive links with clinical staff to effect positive hospital artsprogrammes and increasing formal involvement of patients in arts planning in hospital.Hospital curation can be a vibrant arena for arts development, and the role of the hospitalcurator is a ground-breaking specialist role that can bring benefits to hospital life. The role ofcurator in hospital deserves to be supported and developed by both the arts and health sectors. ACCEPTED peer-reviewed

The advent of integration as a feature of contemporary medical curricula can be seen as an advantage for the medical humanities in that it provides a clear implementation strategy for the inclusion of medical humanities content and/or perspectives, while also making its relevance to medical education more apparent. This paper discusses an example of integration of humanities content into a graduate medical course, raises questions about the desirability of an exclusively integrated approach, and argues for the value of retaining a discrete and coherent disciplinary presence for the medical humanities in medical curricula.

Burnout--a stress-related syndrome characterized by exhaustion, depersonalization, and a diminished sense of accomplishment--is a common phenomenon among medical students with significant potential consequences for student health, professionalism, and patient care. This essay proposes that the epidemic of medical student burnout can be attributed to a technocratic paradigm that fails to value medical students as persons with human needs and limitations. After briefly reviewing the literature on medical student burnout, the author uses two theories to elucidate potential causes: unsatisfactory aspects of the learning environment and a feeling one's efforts are meaningless or irrelevant. Cultural factors also facilitate burnout in medical students immersed in a clinical environment that cultivates excessive detachment from patient and self, impairing self-care, damaging a sense of self, and impeding the development of a mature, well-integrated professional identity. The ethical implications of medical student burnout are also addressed. Finally, this paper suggests possible preventive and remediative strategies such as optimizing the learning environment as well as narrative approaches that promise enhancement of both individual and institutional well-being.

This paper first distinguishes governance (collective, autonomous self-regulatory processes) from government (externally-imposed mandatory regulation); it proposes that the second of these is essentially incompatible with a conception of the medical humanities that involves imagination and vision on the part of medical practitioners. It next develops that conception of the medical humanities, as having three distinguishable aspects (all of them distinct from the separate phenomena popularly known as "arts-in-health"): first, an intellectual enquiry into the nature of clinical medicine; second, an important dimension of medical education; third, a resource for moral and aesthetic influences upon clinical practice, supporting "humane health care" as the moral inspirations behind organised medicine. Medical humanities sustains these three aspects through paying proper attention to the existential and subjective aspects of medicine. By encouraging authentic imagination among health care practitioners, medical humanities aligns well with both humane health care and governance in the sense of self-regulation. However, it can neither be achieved mechanistically nor well-measured through proxies such as patient satisfaction. Above all, it should not be allowed to supply, through inappropriate qualitative "targets," new forms of management tyranny.

This special issue emerges as a result of papers delivered at the 1st International Health Humanities Conference: Madness & Literature, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, and held at the Institute of Mental Health at the University of Nottingham, August 6–8, 2010. The conference, which included keynotes from Elaine Showalter (The Female Malady) and Kay Redfield Jamison (Touched By Fire), was hosted as part of a range of initiatives based at the University of Nottingham which we call ‘Health Humanities’—an evolution of Medical Humanities towards greater inclusion of and engagement with allied health professionals including nurses, occupational therapists and those practicing the expressive therapies, as well as carers, service-users and a wider selfcaring public. Our aim is to address the growing and broadening demand from other professions to become involved and to include new sectors of the healthcare workforce, as well as informal carers who have often been left out of the medical humanities so far. Different disciplines have increasingly come to value the contribution made by the humanities, and fresh opportunities are emerging in healthcare for the development of new approaches in the humanities. Our conference was a landmark attempt to bring some of these ideas together. Focussing on madness in all its guises, it was accompanied by a new website, www. madnessandliterature.org, which has so far attracted over 300 academic, clinical and lay members worldwide and offers numerous short reviews of ‘Mad Literature’ or ‘Mad Lit.’—fiction and autobiography that documents and details a diverse range of human experience that falls within the category madness. Why is ‘Mad Lit.’ generating such interest? As we note in our book, Madness in Post1945 British and American Fiction (Baker et al. 2010), it provides valuable and sometimes contrasting insights into the traumatising experience of mental illness, attitudes towards individuals deemed ill, and the treatments, social networks, institutions and historical or J Med Humanit (2011) 32:253–255 DOI 10.1007/s10912-011-9157-1