Biography - Corpus

The Fortnightly Ignorance Club

21 May 2018 Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

Many of us now resort to Google whenever we want to know something; in fact the ease of looking things up also makes it less important to retain any information. We can, we believe, be instant experts. In 1881, a group of women in Rochester, New York, decided that they had pressing questions to which they did not know the answer. They decided that ‘the only bad question was the one that went unasked’. Unashamed of their ignorance, they advertised the fact, forming the Fortnightly Ignorance Club. One of the earliest American women to graduate in medicine (graduating in 1851), Sarah Adamson Dolley, became the first President of the Club, and remained in office until 1893.

It seems unlikely that any male doctor at the time would have owned to ignorance but Sarah Dolley had never been one to stick to convention.

“A Prescription for Action”

4 December 2017 1 Comment

Tree Cocks

A Prescription for Action: The Life of Dr Janet Irwin by Susan Currie tells the fascinating life story of New Zealand born and trained Janet Irwin, medical doctor and social activist.

Born in 1923, Janet’s childhood in the Hokianga was free-ranging, but not without significant challenges, which may have influenced her subsequent interests in medicine. From her mother, Lucy, Janet inherited a voracious appetite for reading. Her father, “Doc Smith” (or “GM” as he was also known) was a legendary and revered doctor in the Hokianga in the early part of the twentieth century, when life there was remote and co-operation arose out of shared hardship. He had come from a farming background in Scotland and, like other early settlers in the area, he could be described as having been “successful in villainy, public service and philanthropy”: he was not above breaking the law in pursuit of what he considered the greater good. He was also charming, warm and empathetic, characteristics shared by his daughter. GM was an iconoclast, as was Janet, who had the gift of forcefully challenging ideas without creating offense.
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Anton Chekhov: a compassionate diagnostician

4 December 2017 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was born in Taganrog, Russia and entered medical school in Moscow aged nineteen. While he was training as a doctor, he wrote humorous articles for weekly journals so that he could help financially support his parents and younger siblings. Increasingly he was drawn to writing serious drama and fiction. He is renowned as a master short story writer and playwright, whose fiction and drama explored the complexities of character and the often hidden depths of meaning in life. Chekhov practised as a medical doctor throughout his life, dying from tuberculosis aged 44.

What made Chekhov’s writing so powerful? Rosamund Bartlett, in her introduction to Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, considers that his appeal was partly “his lack of pretentiousness”, largely, she considers, a result of the “practical, down-to-earth objectivity Chekhov acquired in his medical training”. [Read more…] about Anton Chekhov: a compassionate diagnostician

‘The Next Patient in the Waiting Room’: Keith Macleod and the clinical encounter

24 April 2017 1 Comment

Gwynnedd Somerville and Charlotte Paul

What are you here for, if not to treat difficult patients?”

“How to take a history from and examine a sick person would seem an unusual starting point to create a philosophy of life … but that did not deter Keith”, writes psychiatrist Sandy Macleod in The Next Patient in the Waiting Room, a book of essays about his father, which we have edited. Keith Macleod joined the Department of Medicine at the University of Otago in 1951 and became a neurologist at Dunedin Hospital. Following his interest in the borderland between neurological and psychiatric disorders, he later became a neuro-psychiatric consultant at Ashburn Hall, retiring in 1983. He was also a philosopher, poet and great talker. The essays in the book explore Keith’s philosophy of life from the point of view of colleagues, family, patients, students, and friends. Here we take the title of the volume to touch on some of his maddeningly difficult ideas.