conversations about medicine and life
Dr Joe Baker
All you need to know about General Practice can be learnt from reading Austen.”
So said Anne, my GP training supervisor. Needless to say when it came to the final exam I fared poorly with the medical emergencies, although I did better with those patients who had complex interpersonal relationship problems.
Rose Stanton
Arts Therapy is a form of psychotherapy which connects with a variety of theoretical frameworks. It is more focused on the creative process and self-understanding than on art as an end product. I practise the multimodal approach. This is the use of two or more expressive therapies to foster awareness, encourage emotional growth, and enhance relationships with others. The expressive arts therapies can be defined as “the use of art, music, dance/movement, drama, poetry/creative writing, play, and sandtray within the context of psychotherapy, counselling, rehabilitation or health care” Malchiodi (2005, p. 2).
Susanne M. Klausen
William Osler once said ‘one of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine’.[1] Tragedies have unfolded when physicians and pharmacists, wooed by pharmaceutical companies as to the wonders of their products, have not heeded this advice.
Sue Wootton
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul”—Walt Whitman (1819-92).
Walt Whitman was a journalist and poet who volunteered as a nurse in 1863-4, during the American Civil War. His major work, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was revised and expanded over the course of nine editions during his lifetime (with a tenth edition published posthumously in 1897).
Whitman’s poetry is intensely observant of the physical world, and deeply attuned to seasonal cycles and the passage of time. Birth and death, aging, disease, injury, love and passion all appear in his work, which is renowned for its oratory style, and its celebration of the embodied nature of human experience. “I sing the body electric”, he wrote. “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”
The poem continues:
Dr Jacob Edmond
I coordinate a University of Otago English paper, ENGL131: Controversial Classics, which is an approved eighth paper for Health Science First Year. As I posted on the course Facebook page, ENGL131 fosters the skills that a recent report suggests are the best predictors of success in the health professions: critical thinking, analysis, and communication.
