conversations about medicine and life
Dr Katherine Hall
In 1613, Johann Remmelin (1583-1632) published the first edition of his anatomy flap book. A 1667 edition, printed from the same printer blocks as the first, is held in the Health Sciences Library at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Recently, with colleagues Dr Simone Marshall and K. John Dennison, I had the opportunity to study it closely.
[Read more…] about Johann Remmelin: a story of a 17th century anatomy flap book
Janet Wainscott
Some years ago, when my mother was still alive and living in a dementia-level rest home, I sat in a meeting for residents’ family members. The discussion turned to activities. One woman said her mother loved poetry, and asked whether poetry could be included in the activities offered. Someone else endorsed the comment and I thought that it would be something that my poetry-loving mother would enjoy. Nothing happened, but later, after my mother’s death, I decided it was an idea worth pursuing.
I was aware that reading, including poetry, is used in some rest homes and day programmes for older people, but I wanted to go beyond reading, discussion and reminiscence. I looked to Gary Glazner’s Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in the USA, and John Killick’s UK dementia poetry programme, In the Pink, for inspiration and guidance. Both projects combined the sharing of poems (especially well-known poems) with the creation of new poems.
Majella Cullinane
In her early twenties, Majella Cullinane set out to explore Africa, the continent she had longed to visit since reading Out of Africa as a teenager in her homeland, Ireland. But in Mozambique, Cullinane suddenly found herself in the grips of a culture shock so severe that it threatened to overwhelm all her previous notions of personal identity. Now a writer herself, Cullinane reflects on the visceral terror of that experience:
Unbelonging
You lie awake in a small room. Lightning illuminates the dressing table, the chair, the curtains. Thunder bruises the night sky with a fist of rage. The rain comes down hard, like a deluge of nails on a corrugated iron roof. It is this sound that takes you back. Up and away to a ninth floor apartment, to another continent. A levitating memory. Where you find yourself in another room, this one marble floored with a high ceiling.
Barbara Snook
During my life I have had more opportunities than most to witness people struggling with words to express sympathy. Not only did my parents die well before their time, but I have lost a son, a husband and a daughter out of the natural order of things. I do not presume to speak on behalf of all bereaved persons, but for me, I appreciated people taking the time to say something – anything. There are no answers or magic words of comfort that take the pain away, but it has always helped me when people open up a conversation about my children or my husband.
Ruth Arnison
a 10-day holiday
with broken hearing aids
Sue Wootton
Rabies is a viral disease causing inflammation of the brain. Its symptoms include agitated mood and body movements, partial paralysis and hydrophobia (fear of water). Suffering is intense, and even in the twenty-first century the prognosis for an infected person is poor. Fortunately there are effective vaccines, the first of which was produced in 1885 by Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux.
[Read more…] about Would you like some gunpowder with that wound care, Sir?
