Over the last 10 years, medical humanities has been Seamus O’Mahony’s primary area of academic interest, and he has published extensively in this area. Many of his papers have been published in the Lancet, Gastroenterology and the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
The Lancet
The abandonment of the sick. 2025; 405:114-5
A fortunate man? 2022; 399:1296-7
Jonathan Miller: finding the considerable in the negligible. 2020; 396:594-5
After the golden age: what is medicine for? 2019; 393:1798-9
The Deathwife, 2018; 392:273
Book review of With The End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix 2018.
Do doctors die better than philosophers? 2018; 391:1474-5
Gastroenterology
Hacking death in Dublin. 2025; 168:1-3
Sir William Osler, the Two Cultures, and the Learned Profession. 2024; 167:633-5
What Will Technology Do to Gastroenterology? 2024; 167:423-5
Why Gastroenterologists Should Be More Interested in Death. 2024; 167:197-9
The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
Reframing the ‘difficult conversation’. 2022; 52:93-4
Petr Skrabanek: the Abominable No-Man, 2019; 49:65-9
Some thoughts on compassion inspired by Sir Thomas Legge, 2018; 48:69-70
Medicine and the McNamara Fallacy, 2017; 47:281-7
The way we die now: a personal reflection, 2016; 46:281-7
Medical Nemesis forty years on: the enduring legacy of Ivan Illich, 2016; 46:134-9
The extraordinary undergraduate career of Oliver St John Gogarty: has the modern medical student anything to learn from him? 2013; 43:169-74
AJ Cronin and The Citadel: Did a work of fiction contribute to the foundation of the NHS? 2012; 42(2):172-8
Further Publications
Revisiting Illich’s Limits to Medicine. In: Handbook of the Medical Humanities. Ed: Bleakley, A. Oxford: Routledge 2020, 114-123.
John Bradshaw: Putting Doctors on Trial – Irish Journal of Medical Science, 2015; 184:559-63
In Praise of Richard Asher – Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2014; 57(4):512-523
Axel Munthe and The Story of San Michele: The perils of being a “fashionable” doctor – Clinical Medicine, 2014; 14(3):321-2
W Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) and St Thomas’s Hospital: Medical School and the making of a writer – Journal of Medical Biography, 2014; 22:53-7
Ethereal and material gain: unanticipated opportunity with illness or disability – Clinical Medicine, 2014; 14(1):44-6
Against Narrative Medicine – Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2013; 56(4):611-9
Medical Classics: Of Human Bondage. British Medical Journal, 2012; 345: e8410.
The death of King George V. Hektoen International, 2012: Special Issue – Fall 2021