Mind-Boggling Medical History: creating a medical history game for nurses

Abstract

This article examines the development of the resource Mind-Boggling Medical History, a card game developed to introduce medical and healthcare history to new and non-traditional audiences for the subject. We explore the methods we used to develop and improve the game, which was reliant on stakeholder participation. We then focus on the impact of Mind-Boggling Medical History on nurses, who have constituted one of the game’s key audiences, and explore its role in supporting nurses’ critical engagement with changing knowledge and concepts of evidence. We also evaluate the limitations in our own approach to collaboration with nurses. Through this, we elucidate the relative lack of engagement, historically speaking, there has been between humanities scholars and nurses. We conclude by pointing to ways in which resources like Mind-Boggling Medical History can open up the academic medical humanities to audiences that the discipline rarely caters to.