Responses to brain injury sit in the intersection between neuroscience and an ethic of care, and require sensitive and dynamic indicators of how an individual with brain injury can learn how to live in the context of a changing environment and multiple timescales. Therapeutic relationships and rhythms underpinning such a dynamic approach are currently obscured by existing models of brain function. Something older is required and we put forward narrative types articulating outcomes of brain injury over various periods and starting points in time. Such storytelling challenges a static neuropsychological paradigm and moves from an ethics that focuses on patient autonomy into one that is reflective of the cognitive supports and therapeutic relationships that underpin ways that the patient can re-find the beat that proves the music is not over.

The current debate on closed-loop brain devices (CBDs) mainly focuses on their use in a medical context; possible criminal justice applications have only received incidental scholarly attention. Unlike in medicine, in criminal justice, CBDs might be offered on behalf of the State and for the purpose of protecting security, rather than realizing healthcare aims. It would be possible to deploy CBDs in the rehabilitation of convicted offenders, similarly to the much-debated possibility of employing other brain interventions in this context. Although such use of CBDs could in principle be consensual, there are significant differences between the choice faced by a criminal offender offered a CBD in the context of criminal justice, and that faced by a patient offered a CBD in an ordinary healthcare context. Employment of CBDs in criminal justice thus raises ethical and legal intricacies not raised by healthcare applications. This paper examines some of these issues under three heads: autonomy, human rights, and accountability.

Cyberbiosecurity is an emerging field that relates to the intersection of cybersecurity and the clinical and research practice in the biosciences. Beyond the concerns that usually arise in the areas of genomics, this paper highlights ethical concerns raised by cyberbiosecurity in clinical neuroscience. These concerns relate not only to the privacy of the data collected by imaging devices, but also the concern that patients using various stimulatory devices can be harmed by a hacker who either obfuscates the outputs or who interferes with the stimulatory process. The paper offers some suggestions as to how to rectify these increasingly dire concerns.

Neuroimaging offers great potential to clinicians and researchers for a host of mental and physical conditions. The use of imaging has been trumpeted for forensic psychiatric and psychological evaluations to allow greater insight into the relationship between the brain and behavior. The results of imaging certainly can be used to inform clinical diagnoses; however, there continue to be limitations in using neuroimaging for insanity cases due to limited scientific backing for how neuroimaging can inform retrospective evaluations of mental state. In making this case, this paper reviews the history of the insanity defense and explains how the use of neuroimaging is not an effective way of improving the reliability of insanity defense evaluations.

It is now nearly forty years since John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall compiled their invaluable and much-used three-volume finding aid, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (1984–1989), and established working-class autobiography as an important documentary source for exploring the lives of the working poor. Life writing now forms the basis of historical research into areas such as the emotions and domestic life that had hardly been imagined at the time that the annotated bibliography was produced. Yet as research into working-class autobiography has extended into new domains of enquiry, there has been less innovation in methodology. Historians typically use autobiographical material to pursue deep-reading strategies and unpack the meaning, experience, and identity of individual writers rather than generalize about working-class life more broadly. In this article I offer an alternative strategy: to take the autobiographical corpus and read it at scale in order to better understand fatherhood in Victorian Britain. Through a combination of intensive and extensive reading, I demonstrate that many working-class men failed to live up to expectations as breadwinners, and I explore the ramifications of that failure for the women and children with whom they lived.

Disorders of consciousness (DOC) continue to profoundly challenge both families and medical professionals. Once a brain-injured patient has been stabilized, questions turn to the prospect of recovery. However, what “recovery” means in the context of patients with prolonged DOC is not always clear. Failure to recognize potential differences of interpretation—and the assumptions about the relationship between health and well-being that underlie these differences—can inhibit communication between surrogate decisionmakers and a patient’s clinical team, and make it difficult to establish the goals of care. The authors examine the relationship between health and well-being as it pertains to patients with prolonged DOC. They argue that changes in awareness or other function should not be equated to changes in well-being, in the absence of a clear understanding of the constituents of well-being for that particular patient. The authors further maintain that a comprehensive conception of recovery for patients with prolonged DOC should incorporate aspects of both experienced well-being and evaluative well-being.

Implanted medical devices—for example, cardiac defibrillators, deep brain stimulators, and insulin pumps—offer users the possibility of regaining some control over an increasingly unruly body, the opportunity to become part “cyborg” in service of addressing pressing health needs. We recognize the value and effectiveness of such devices, but call attention to what may be less clear to potential users—that their vulnerabilities may not entirely disappear but instead shift. We explore the kinds of shifting vulnerabilities experienced by people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) who receive therapeutic deep brain stimulators to help control their tremors and other symptoms of PD.