conversations about medicine and life

These are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS

3 Comments

Emma Storr

The publication of this new anthology of poems by UK National Health Service (NHS) staff could not have come at a more apposite time. The coronavirus pandemic has made we who live in the UK acutely aware of the vital role of our free health service. Appreciation of the hard work and dedication of its workforce is paramount and sales of the anthology have rocketed.  I am privileged to have had two of my poems included so this review cannot be totally unbiased and objective.

These are the Hands is the brainchild of Dr Katie Amiel, GP and the Emergency Poet Deborah Alma, well known for touring the UK in her converted ambulance and prescribing poetry for support and enjoyment. You might wonder if we need yet another anthology that deals with the everyday drama of illness, recovery or death. But this collection is different and refreshing because it gives voice to ‘unseen and unsung’ people in the NHS such as cleaners, library and managerial staff as well as healthcare students and clinicians. It allows those providing nursing and medical care to show us their own vulnerability. The poems are in a variety of forms and voices, often unpredictable but easily accessible and engaging. The Foreword to These are the Hands is by Michael Rosen, well-known writer, broadcaster and poet, whose own poem, written for the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the NHS, gives the anthology its title. He describes the contributors as revealing  ‘the hidden places of their minds in these intimate moments’ of clinical and workplace encounters. The final poem is by poet Lemn Sissay titled “Making a Difference”, a performance piece that should be read in a loud voice from every hospital balcony, GP surgery or Care Home doorstep.  It is celebratory, life-affirming and splendid, as you might expect from this skilled, outspoken poet.

[Read more…]

“Tooth and Veil”

6 Comments

Barbara Brookes

A 1953 film advertising a ‘Friendly Career’ promised young New Zealand women ‘dignity and satisfaction’ in becoming dental nurses. Noel O’Hare’s Tooth and Veil: The life and times of the New Zealand dental nurse (Massey University Press, 2020) gives a rather different view. From 1921, when training began, reams of rules, military discipline and rigid inspections governed the lives of the young women who enrolled. In this, their experience was probably not so different from general nurses training at the time. Once the dental nurses completed their training, however, they stood a good chance of being sent to live in a remote area with substandard accommodation and little support.

In lively prose and with an eye for telling details from oral history, O’Hare romps through the rise and fall of the once lauded New Zealand dental nurse service. O’Hare acknowledges his debt to Susan Moffat’s thorough PhD thesis. Unlike her work, his aim is less to understand the rise and fall of the service than to give voice to many of the women who polished copper sterilisers, cleaned waste tanks, and cut perfect sets of teeth from soap while in training. After two years at the training school, dental nurses were thrown on their own resources in single-nurse clinics scattered from the far north to the deep south. In small places like Otautau in Southland, adults might call looking for ‘dentures to be mended, gold inlays to be replaced’ and extractions, seeing the new dental nurse as a source of free treatment. Parents of school children might resent a nurse who felt compelled to wash a child before attending to their teeth. One parent scribbled the nurse a note of advice: ‘My boy ain’t no rose, drill him, don’t smell him.’ The anecdotes from the nurses themselves, and the images, are the highlight of this attractively-produced book.

[Read more…]

Poetry, music, and an ethics of care

4 Comments

Sophia Wilson

In February 2020, as a Covid-19 outbreak had led to lockdown in Wuhan and was sparking alarm around the globe, a small audience gathered in a Dunedin Methodist church for an evening of conversation between Behrouz Boochani and Professor Alison Phipps. Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish refugee, journalist and film maker who recently achieved both fame and literary acclaim from within the walls of Manus Island Detention Centre for his novel No Friend but the Mountains. Professor Alison Phipps is the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow. She was in Dunedin as the 2019 De Carle Distinguished lecturer at the University of Otago. Present also were Neil Vallely (Centre for Global Migrations, University of Otago), Ali Mostolizadeh, (Translator and PhD candidate in Sociology and Legal Studies, University of Waterloo) and respected Dunedin poets Emma Neale and Rhian Gallagher.

It’s not often a discussion about human rights abuses and serious political regression ends with a celebration of poetry and music, but given the guests, this was a natural outcome.

The evening’s conversation embraced issues of race, colonialism and the purpose of language. Medicine, in particular psychiatry, wove its way through the narrative, not as an altruistic, heroic vehicle for healing, but as a spectre of oppression and control.

[Read more…]

DrawThis! Hacking a way out of isolation

1 Comment

Liz Breslin

What do you do, with these limitations given to you?

It’s a question we’ve been variously asking ourselves these past weeks. There is no right answer. Not King Lear, not sourdough. But isn’t it interesting to notice where we go?

I went to a hackathon in week two of Level Four, I think it was, but pick a number, in these numbered times. I went because something I read said community and connection and because I was missing that and because I was scared to, so I did. A hackathon is a thing  where you tech together to create solutions. You have 48 hours to #HacktheCrisis. No pressure. Actually, lots of pressure. Time pressure. Confusion. What was I doing? I rumbled around in a #general zone until I found myself in a team of eight, six of us at our first hackathon, hacking the heck out of  an idea that made my heart sing.

[Read more…]

Mortality and me

3 Comments

Pam Morrison 

There is a book, a memoir by Wendy Parkins, that has been sitting on the fold-down oak hall table opposite my bedroom for over a month, in the appointed position for objects that are due for return. It didn’t beat the lock-down and so it sits, mute, uncannily prescient, and currently a triumphant personal declaration. Every morning, so far, I’m alive. For now.

The book’s title has captured a potent truth. For here I am, self-protecting by order, sealed in my home in a transformed world, where every morning I hear of tens of thousands more who are no longer alive. They are the mounting daily toll of the dead. This is news to no one, yet as I read it again, punched into words on my computer, I find myself reeling. Just two months ago, I sat under the canopy of a sprawling sycamore at the bach, encircled by friends. From memory, no-one made mention of the plague that was to come. We simply had no idea.

Right now there are now more people in lock-down than were alive during World War 2. I’m sharing the experience of confinement with 2.6 billion other humans. I find this out on Google, as I flail for information that will anchor this experience for me. But of course that doesn’t anchor me at all. If anything I feel even more unmoored, less able to situate myself in relation to anything I once knew to be true. The big picture has lost its edges.

[Read more…]