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Archives for March 2019

The long swim: a response to miscarriage

March 4, 2019 2 Comments

Kirstie McKinnon

whale and calfMiscarriage can be a difficult experience. It feels delicate for me still, although it has been several years since my last miscarriage. There is a silence that accompanies this kind of loss, a lack of conversation, a lack of acknowledgement, a problem of knowing how to say how it is, and to whom. Dolphins and whales tell their grief through action and their way of speaking has provided me – after a long time – with a way to find some human language to express my own ‘long swim’.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Bereavement, Death, Midwifery, Poetry, Women's Health

Stewart Peters: Unqualified practitioner of medicine, dentistry and pharmacy.

March 4, 2019 4 Comments

Robert McAllister

Doctor PetersStewart Peters was born in Scotland about 1860 and studied medicine at Glasgow University. He passed the first two professional exams but left the course before the final exam. He found work as a ship’s surgeon on a whaler named Resolute, which sailed to Davis Strait, between Greenland and Newfoundland, to carry out whaling for a season. There is a sequel to that later.

On his return to Dundee he decided to find work in New Zealand and sailed there on the SS Wellington in 1883. Gold had been discovered in Otago twenty-two years previously, and Dunedin, Mosgiel and Outram were thriving as support centres for fortune hunters on their way to the goldfields. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Biography, History

Right eating: Dr Muriel Bell

March 4, 2019 1 Comment

Barbara Brookes

Muriel Bell book coverThe bag of nuts I have in front of me has a Health Star Rating of 5. The back of the packet tells me the nuts contain vitamins B1 and E, are a source of monosaturated fats and a source of fibre. With this good news I am invited to enjoy ‘happy snacking’. But I’m sure that ‘snacking’ in itself is not good for me. Snacks in between meals can only add to my overall calorie intake and hence increase my weight. I might join the stream of overweight New Zealanders (if I’m not already swimming in it) threatening to overwhelm our health services.

Dr Muriel Bell spent her life dedicated to thinking about nutrition and its effects on New Zealanders’ health. Diana Brown’s recently published valuable biography of this pioneering medical researcher, The Unconventional Career of Dr Muriel Bell, charts Bell’s life from her childhood, when vitamins were a little-known entity, to her death in 1974, by which time she had played a major role in nutrition research and education in New Zealand.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Memoir, Nutrition, Public health

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