Finding fiction on health subjects

Ages ago my son and I watched David Walliams' Grandpa's great escape.   Grandpa is living with dementia and the film is a thought provoking portrayal of that and of how people living with it are treated.  


That made me think that fiction on health conditions could be useful for health students, as a way to get insights into living with a condition, and into life for carers.


Then I wondered how you might locate such fiction.


Here are some ways.


University of Leicester Library Search


(if you are not at the University of Leicester, your library may have an equivalent).



[name of condition] fiction


To find fiction itself, and articles about it.


I tried this with dementia and found some fiction, and also a 2005 article in the British Journal of Social Work about dementia in children's fiction.   


An old article, but that might not matter - you would need to check for more recent fiction, and check that the books referred to have not become culturally inappropriate in any way since (I am not suggesting this is the case).


You might find other, more recent, articles, by searching a citation database to see who had cited it.






PubMed


I searched PubMed for the same two terms.    Quite a lot comes up where the word "fiction" is used metaphorically - "fact or fiction", that sort of thing. 


But also there are relevant items, including at least one about dementia in the movies.  Those articles would hopefully lead you to actual fiction.


Try sorting by best match (you may see some best matches in a box at the top of the search results, if they are sorted in another way).


Try searching:


"Medicine in Literature"[Mesh] dementia

"Literature"[Mesh] dementia


Although, an article called "If They Were Real: Lessons Learned from Literary Characters With Dementia", was indexed under neither of these MeSH headings.


Literature[Mesh] may find articles discussing the nature of academic literature and also material about older literature (the classics, Shakespeare, that sort of thing).



For the movies, there is a MeSH heading Motion Pictures.


Cinahl


There is a subject heading Literature and another Books.   Both look helpful.  Cinahl will also show you citing articles, which finds one from 2012 that cited the 2005 one I allude to above.


Other search terms for "dementia" are of course available and using Alzheimer or Alzheimers may also help, in any database.