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\"Oasis Natrun: a private, exclusive, highly secret luxury health spa for mummies, high in the hills above Marseille, equipped with the very latest in therapeutic innovations both magical and medical. To Dr. Greta Helsing, London's de facto mummy specialist, it sounds like paradise. But when Greta is invited to spend four months there as the interim clinical director, it isn't long before she finds herself faced with a medical mystery that will take all her diagnostic skill to solve\"-- Provided by publisher.

With the character of the doctor as her subject, Tabitha Sparks follows the decline of the marriage plot in the Victorian novel. As Victorians came to terms with the scientific revolution in medicine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the novel's progressive distance from the conventions of the marriage plot can be indexed through a rising identification of the doctor with scientific empiricism. A narrative's stance towards scientific reason, Sparks argues, is revealed by the fictional doctor's relationship to the marriage plot. Thus, novels that feature romantic doctors almost invariably deny the authority of empiricism, as is the case in George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart. In contrast, works such as Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science, which highlight clinically minded or even sinister doctors, uphold the determining logic of science and, in turn, threaten the novel's romantic plot. By focusing on the figure of the doctor rather than on a scientific theme or medical field, Sparks emulates the Victorian novel's personalization of tropes and belief systems, using the realism associated with the doctor to chart the sustainability of the Victorian novel's central imaginative structure, the marriage plot. As the doctors Sparks examines increasingly stand in for the encroachment of empirical knowledge on a morally formulated artistic genre, their alienation from the marriage plot and its interrelated decline succinctly herald the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of Modernism.

\"When Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, is unexpectedly called to Paris to present at a medical conference, she expects nothing more exciting than professional discourse on zombie reconstructive surgery and skin disease in bogeymen--and hopefully at least one uneventful night at the Opera. Unfortunately for Greta, Paris happens to be infested with a coven of vampires--and not the civilized kind. If she hopes to survive, Greta must navigate the darkest corners of the City of Lights, the maze of ancient catacombs and mine-tunnels underneath the streets, where there is more to find than simply dead men's bones\"-- Provided by publisher.

Social media is used to promote the HPV vaccine through various strategies, including the use of stories and narratives. Understanding the ethical concerns related to the use of social media in this capacity are important. The purpose of this study is to identify ethical concerns of using fictional stories to share information and emotions about the HPV vaccine on social media, ultimately to influence parents on their decision to vaccinate their child. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional survey with researchers in the fields of health communication, cancer prevention, social media, and public health ethics from October to December 2021. Respondents were presented with a fictional story that consisted of seven connected vignettes about the HPV vaccine. For each vignette, respondents were asked to rate the potential benefits and risk, as well as the potential for ethical concerns of using the fictional narrative style to share information about the HPV vaccine. Descriptive statistics summarized responses, and qualitative data were analyzed thematically. Results: On average, respondents (n = 41) perceived more benefits than risks when it comes to 1) using social media for health education generally and 2) using a story with connected vignettes for vaccine communication. The vignettes prioritizing vaccine hesitancy, positive emotion, and health equity were seen as having the most potential benefit, while the vignettes highlighting vaccine confidence and skepticism were seen as having the most potential risk. Overall, respondents felt there were several ethical concerns of note – persuasion was the most common (15 % of respondents) followed by deception (9 %) and manipulation (8 %). Qualitative data highlighted the importance of transparency and trust to avoid ethical violations and negative outcomes. Conclusions: Ethical concerns exist when using fictional stories to share health information on social media, particularly as new online technologies make it harder to tell fact from fiction. Practical and actionable recommendations for researchers must be developed, defining a range of ethical responsibilities.

\"Greta Helsing inherited the family's highly specialized, and highly peculiar, medical practice. In her consulting rooms, Dr. Helsing treats the undead for a host of ills--vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights, and entropy in mummies. Although barely making ends meet, this is just the quiet, supernatural-adjacent life Greta's been groomed for since childhood--until a sect of murderous monks emerges, killing human and undead Londoners alike. As terror takes hold of the city, Greta must use her unusual skills to stop the cult if she hopes to save her practice and her life\"-- Provided by publisher.

Reading Camus’ The Plague , a physician wonders why the hero doesn’t prescribe sulfa drugs. If there’s such a thing as “literary malpractice,” she asks, is it the questionable prescribing of a fictional character or the heavy-footed perseverations of a too-literal reader?

Background Children living in challenged humanitarian settings (including those in rural/underserved areas, the displaced, refugees, in conflict/post conflict situations) are at greater risk of mental health difficulties or behavioural problems, with caregivers acting as their main protective factors. While many family skills programmes exist, very few were developed for, or piloted in, low resource settings (settings with limited infrastructure, typical of humanitarian settings). We therefore designed a brief and light programme; the Strong Families (SF) programme, consisting of 5 h contact time over 3 weeks. We conducted a pilot study with the aim to test the feasibility of implementation, and a preliminary look at the effectiveness of SF, in improving child behaviour and family functioning in families living in Afghanistan. Methods We recruited female caregivers and children aged 8–12 years through schools and drug treatment centres in Afghanistan and enrolled them in the SF programme. Demographic data, emotional and behavioural difficulties of children and parental skills and family adjustment measures were collected from caregivers before, 2 and 6 weeks after the intervention. Outcome was assessed through the SDQ (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire), assessing children’s behavioural, emotional, and social issues, and PAFAS (Parenting and Family Adjustment Scales), measuring parenting practices and family functioning. Results We enrolled 72 families in the programme with a 93.1% retention rate ( n  = 67) for data collection 6 weeks post intervention. Mean age of caregivers was 36.1 years, they had 3.8 children on average and 91.7% of them had experienced war/armed conflict in their past. The average total difficulty score of the SDQ (ranging from 0 to 40, with scores above 16 being indicative of high problems) of the 72 children reduced significantly, from 17.8 at pre-test to 12.9 at post-test and 10.6 at second follow-up, with no difference in gender and most noticeably amongst those with the highest scores at baseline. Likewise, PAFAS scores decreased significantly after the programme, again with caregivers with the highest scores at baseline improving most. Conclusions The implementation of a brief family skills programme was seemingly effective and feasible in a resource-limited setting and positively improved child mental health and parenting practices and family adjustment skills. These results suggest the value of such a programme and call for further validation through other methods of impact assessment and outcome evaluation. Trial registration ISRCTN76509384 . Retrospectively registered on March 9, 2020.

The paper aims to develop a critical sociocultural understanding on the epistemological and historical analysis of evidence-based (EB) paradigm in contemporary psychological knowledge-production (research) and knowledge-application (practice). It firstly retraces the emergence of EB in medical disciplines, its paradigmatic status, and its subsequent adoption by mainstream psychological sciences. The description of EB historical roots and key concepts leads to the second part, where the paper reflects on key epistemological criticalities scholars have raised toward the EB paradigm. Then, we develop our sociocultural perspective to enrich the epistemological analysis and critique of EB. Specifically, we propose a hermeneutic and interpretative understanding which frames EB as a re-enactment of the positivist scientific research ambition to reach for a complete formalization of biological/psychological phenomena (endo-genetical dynamics), and of new socioeconomic, political, and individual needs posed by contemporary Western societal institutions to scientific knowledge (exo-genetical dynamics). Furthermore, building on such understanding, we suggest that EB works as a contemporary epistemic indicator and threshold, serving two functions: selective filtering and exclusion. Finally, we speculate that EB endo-genetical and exo-genetical developmental dynamics can be interpreted as an expression of the contemporary presentist regime of temporality and as a shift towards the regime of performative techniques instead of context-specific and future-oriented relational competences, also tracing a determining factor that has directed, directs and will continue to direct scientific research in psychology.

Reading is a complex task that requires cognitive and emotional engagement. The integrated instruction approach, incorporating strategy instruction and literature circles, was developed to improve Chinese students’ reading comprehension, reading motivation, and strategy use in reading fiction books. The current study adopted a quasi-experimental pretest–posttest treatment–control group design. A total of 87 sixth graders (aged 11–12 years) were assigned to three groups, receiving integrated instruction (INI), literature circle (LC), or traditional Chinese instruction (TRC), respectively, over 12 weeks. A reading comprehension test, reading motivation questionnaire, and strategy questionnaire were used to measure students’ abilities before and after the quasi-experiment. Paired-samples t-tests, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) were used to compare reading-related outcomes within and between groups. The results indicated that the students in the INI group significantly improved their reading comprehension, all aspects of reading motivation, and strategy use; the LC and TRC students also significantly improved some aspects of their reading motivation and strategy use, but to a lesser degree than the INI students. These findings reveal evidence-based effects of INI and LC on multiple reading outcomes in the Chinese cultural and lingual context.

Background Stories are an integral aspect of everyday life, and within medicine and medical education a wide range of stories are told every day. These stories include patients’ stories or stories from those who care for patients. Doctors share stories and do so for many reasons. This includes doctors’ life stories, which we have defined for the purposes of this review as non-fiction stories told first-hand by doctors about their own experiences. When used in undergraduate medical education, these doctors’ life stories allow students to explore, reflect on, and learn from aspects of clinical life they may not yet have experienced. The evidence on doctors’ life stories is sparse however, and this review aimed to explore doctors’ life stories within the context of undergraduate medical education. Methods A scoping review methodology was utilised, informed by established methodological guidance and recommendations. A search of five databases, the grey literature, and a hand search of the references of the included articles was carried out. Data from included articles were then collated and analysed using descriptive numerical summary analysis and qualitative content analysis. Results A total of 4,978 articles were screened, and 48 articles were included. Included articles were published over a 33-year period, with a significant increase in the number of articles published in the last 10 years. The findings from this review show that doctors’ life stories have been used in multiple key areas of undergraduate medical education and to achieve a variety of intended educational outcomes. The findings highlight a lack of conceptual clarity, evidenced by the range of terms used to describe doctors’ life stories and the lack of a clear definition being described within the literature. To address this, the authors propose a definition to enhance conceptual clarity, complemented by a conceptual framework that provides a structured representation of the phenomenon. Conclusion Doctors’ life stories are an emerging topic area within undergraduate medical education and are used in areas that are crucial in supporting the development of medical students into doctors. This scoping review acts as a foundation to guide teaching practice and future research within this area.