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I like to watch

19 December 2016 Leave a Comment

Doug Lilly

This is the time of year where you may turn to a newspaper or magazine to search for recommended titles to read over the summer holidays (apologies to our Corpus readers in the northern hemisphere).

However I am not a “reader”. Those who have seen my not too insignificant collection of books might find this surprising. Over more than 45 of my adult years I have built a library of books that I had (and probably still have) every intention of reading – some day. Many have been leafed through and partially read. Many more retain their mint smell and feel. My vast, obsessive and largely unread collection of books on Bob Dylan fool many into thinking I am some sort of expert on the man.

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A classic in the history of medicine: “A Midwife’s Tale”

19 December 2016 Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

A Midwifes Tale ‘I was Calld to Mrs Howards this morning for to see her son. Find him very low. Went from Mrs Howards to see Mrs Williams. Find her very unwell. Hannah Cool is there. From thence to Joseph Fosters to see her sick Children. Find Saray & Daniel very ill. Came home went to the field & got some Cold water root. Then Calld to Mr Kenydays to see Polly. Very ill with the Canker. Gave her some of the root. I gargled her throat which gave her great Ease. Returned home after dark. Mr Ballard been to Cabesy. His throat is very soar. He gargled with my tincture. Find relief & went to bed comfortably.’ [Read more…] about A classic in the history of medicine: “A Midwife’s Tale”

To read, perchance to dream

19 December 2016 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Save the world? Let’s all start reading again, that’s what I say. Reading a book is an intensely personal activity. It’s just you and the words, make of them what you will. People can tell you what a book means to them, but no one can tell you what it means to you. That’s between you and the book. To find out, you need to come to know the book and your own mind. Those discoveries are generated in the private act of exploration we call reading. To be immersed in a book is to inhabit a creative and enchanted space, which is no bad thing to practice doing in a world that has come to feel distressingly devoid of magic. Because what is magic, if not another word for hope?

Here’s some of the fiction and non-fiction that I especially enjoyed in 2016. One way or another all these books address aspects of health, illness and wellbeing. Most of these titles are fairly recent publications, although I’ve included several older books that were new to me. Perhaps there’s something here to keep you company over the holidays, or better still to place on your bedside table to be part of your new year’s resolution to read for half an hour every night before sleep … to read yourself to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream …

A Hospice Christmas

12 December 2016 Leave a Comment

Max Reid

An ancient Jewish legend tells of the wooden flute that Moses played while he shepherded his Uncle Jethro’s sheep on the hillsides of Midian. After his death, the people of Israel came to venerate anything that could be associated with Moses’ life – including his flute. Yet it was but a simple and humble wooden flute. Clearly, in its existing form, it was not worthy of the veneration now accorded it. So the flute was sent off to the finest artisans and craftsmen in Israel. It was overlaid with gold and silver, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and many jewels. It was now, indeed, a flute worthy of the people’s veneration. Unfortunately, however, it could no longer sound a note.

For many of us, Christmas has become much the same. Overlaid with a mix of secular, pagan and other religious rites and traditions, it is hard to hear what may be its message to us today. Yet it remains the one day of the year when more people attend Church than any other – as if the corporate singing of a carol or three will somehow expunge the pain and grief, anger and frustration that have marked out many of the other 364 days.

Many years ago, in effectively another life, I was a parish minister, faced yet again with the task of making the Christmas story somehow meaningful: allowing the flute, despite its multiple layers of accretion, to somehow sound its song.

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A correct compassion

12 December 2016 Leave a Comment

Alan Roddick

The only poem I have ever written directly about dentistry is called “A Patient”. When I wrote it, some fifty years ago, James Kirkup’s “A Correct Compassion” was the only example I knew of a poem ‘about’ medicine. It is both a vivid description of a cardiac surgeon, observed by medical students, performing a mitral stenosis valvotomy, and an extended metaphor for the writing of a poem.

At the end of the operation (and the end of the poem), the surgeon’s ‘“I do not stitch up the pericardium. // It is not necessary.’” is matched by the poet’s conclusion:

For this is imagination’s other place, / Where only necessary things are done.”

The occasion of my own poem was less dramatic, but I like to think it demonstrates that a dental extraction, another occasion where ‘only necessary things are done’, can make a fitting subject for a poem.

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Seeking health away from home

12 December 2016 Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

The idea of retreating from the world in search of health is alive and well today. People imagine that holidays from everyday routine will renew their health and vigor, and specialised retreats, involving meditation and yoga, offer a more introspective way of achieving health. As Jocelyn Harris’s post about Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon notes, seaside resorts and spas towns as places to seek health have a fascinating history. While pondering the alienation of the working class, Karl Marx, for example, treated his ailments (and perhaps his hypochondria) by visits to the spa at Karlsbad in Central Europe in the 1870s.^[1]

I’m currently working on the American idea of a ‘sanitarium’, a word coined by John Harvey Kellogg, MD. Today the name Kellogg is synonymous with cornflakes but the Seventh Day Adventist Dr Kellogg built his career as the man in charge of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan.