conversations about medicine and life
Dr Colin Oscar Peez
Corpus is pleased to announce that we have secured a sponsor. The Danish company VævPoop has committed to sponsor our site for 2019. At a time when there are a plethora of questionable new remedies and health fads on the market, we were wary at first of the claims made in relation to their product.
Sue Wootton
Corpus has had another great year, publishing 127 posts on a wide variety of health-related topics by a wide variety of writers. Recently we also passed 100,000 reads of articles on the site since we launched Corpus in May 2016. The total number of articles we’ve published so far is over 350.
Corpus is now taking a lengthy break over summer. Posts on the site will resume on an intermittent basis from March 2019. Due to other commitments and a lack of funding, we will be unable to keep up the pace of publishing three articles a week.
The website will stay online indefinitely so you can dip back into articles you enjoyed or haven’t read yet. Just use the search and category boxes to find something of interest.
Many thanks again to all those who have contributed such thoughtful pieces over the past three years. We can’t sign off without a special thank you to our unsung hero Doug Lilly who has managed the design and technical side of the site since its inception (even though it made him intolerably grumpy at times as he fought off the spammers and hackers).
Here’s a small selection of 2018’s most popular posts to dip back into:
Barbara Brookes
The 1917 War Pensions Amendment Act contained a chilling ‘Third Schedule’ outlining the payment ratio to a full war pension paid for certain kinds of disablement. Loss of two limbs, of both hands, or ‘very serious facial disfigurement‘, for example, qualified for the total pension. Amputation of the right arm at the shoulder joint led to an 85% entitlement while such an amputation of the left arm led to 80% entitlement. A differential entitlement for right and left hand continued throughout the schedule but men who had been certified as left-handed were entitled to the higher amount. Total deafness led to a 70% entitlement while loss of one eye was costed at a 50% entitlement. ‘Lunacy’ qualified for a 100% entitlement, if it could be proven. The Inspector General of Hospitals, Frank Hay, declared in 1919 that ‘a man of sound mind, fighting honestly for a cause, will face dangers and undergo great deprivations without losing his mental balance … It is different with those predisposed to mental disorder.’ Often, he suggested, in line with contemporary hereditarian thinking about mental illness, the latter were ‘feeble-minded persons’.
The First World War did much to break such hereditarian beliefs. The new kind of deskilled warfare – where men just had to wait in trenches before following the order to go ‘over the top’ often to their death – led to many breaking down with a new disorder, popularly known as ‘shell shock’. This manifested itself in numerous ways: various forms of paralysis, amnesia, inability to speak, tics, insomnia and horrific nightmares. Medical authorities at first feared malingering but the sheer numbers of men breaking down led to new treatments in the later years of the war. As early as May 1916, an Auckland osteopath was advertising his services for ‘shell shock’ and suggested he would treat ‘a limited number of returned servicemen’ free of charge. [Read more…]
Sue Wootton
Regeneration by Pat Barker was first published in 1991. It is the first of three novels (known collectively as The Regeneration Trilogy) set during and after the First World War, and explores the experiences of British officers suffering from ‘shell shock’ who received treatment at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh.
Regeneration centres on the radically new treatment provided at the time by the real-life psychiatrist and neurologist W. H. R. Rivers, whose approach was based on his research into nerve regeneration. Craiglockhart patients included the poets Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon, who also feature in Barker’s novel.
Regeneration is a terrific, absorbing read. In lucid, measured prose, Barker brings alive both the suffering of the soldiers and the specific challenges faced by hospital staff. She vividly conveys contemporary attitudes to war and patriotism, and medical theories about shell shock and its treatment. She also brings alive the setting of Craiglockhart, where, in real life, Wilfred Owen began to compose his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” in 1917. The title is from a line by the Roman poet Horace. Owen uses the whole quote to conclude his poem. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: ‘it is sweet and honourable to die for your country’.
This poem always bears rereading. It never loses its power to remind us that the choice to wage war has a terrible price. On the centenary anniversary of Armistace Day, a hundred years since the guns at long, long last fell silent on the Western Front, we can perhaps best honour those thousands who suffered by reflecting on Owen’s call to question the ‘high zest’ of adversarial political and patriotic rhetoric. This is a poem for peace. [Read more…]
Katherine Hall
Much has been written about how the arts and humanities can contribute to our understanding of life, but little (if anything) about the positive effects of video games. Having been an avid player of World of Warcraft for ten years I would like to write about the lessons of how to live well that I have gained from spending my time in this activity (as of this moment: 224 days, 19 hours, 20 minutes, and 40 seconds on my main character or ‘main’).
World of Warcraft (WOW) was released in 2004. It has over a hundred million accounts but only a small number of these – about five million – represent active players. Still, this means an awful lot of people around the world are playing it.
Essentially, you construct a character which is either of the Alliance or Horde faction. This is a fundamental distinction, as there is only very limited communication possible between the two factions – waving hands, farting in their general direction or similar bodily movements. Almost all player-to-player interaction occurs within your faction, and especially within your Guild. A Guild is a group of players admitted by a designated player already in the Guild. Your Guild is your WOW family, the players you chat with and get to know best on a daily basis. [Read more…]