Education - Corpus

The power of the primary source

10 December 2018 Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

In 1976, Professor Cyril Dixon, Head of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at the University of Otago, handed me a Preventive Medicine Dissertation written in 1942 by a 5th year medical student. I was a twenty-one-year-old history honours student working on a dissertation on abortion in the 1930s. Donald McAllister’s dissertation provided a source I never imagined existed: an interview with a ‘backstreet’ abortionist. Here I learned of the desperation of the mainly married women who had abortions performed in the back of the abortionist’s car. He knew his anatomy and about sterilising his implements (a No. 8 gum elastic catheter, slightly modified) and how to protect his identity (by performing his services in the dark). I tracked down Dr McAllister who was happy to speak to me and I learned even more. I was fascinated by his insights into the murky, undercover world of backstreet abortion.

Trust your instincts

15 October 2018 2 Comments

Jess Thompson

As a nutrition student, I have developed an immense appreciation for food and have become infinitely grateful for the role that nutrients play in keeping us alive and healthy. So I was very surprised when my younger sister fell ill with anorexia nervosa. She had watched a set of emotive health documentaries and had read numerous articles that slam key dietary components such as sugar, while promoting healthy eating and weight loss. This prompted her to follow a so-called “healthy diet” with the aim of losing weight. This shocked me because my sister already had a slim figure and had never been one to care about her health.

Weeks passed with her meal sizes decreasing, her exercise increasing, and her care for healthy food progressing from an interest to an obsession. She became consumed by health gurus on social media and took every false health claim to heart. Her healthy eating stint progressed to the point where she would refuse to eat any foods containing preservatives or oil, was suddenly a self-proclaimed “coeliac” and “vegan”, and was “lactose intolerant”. Eventually she was admitted to hospital with a weight of only 41 kilograms and an alarmingly slow heart rate of 29 beats per minute. She was at risk of heart failure, and we did not know if she would survive.

[Read more…] about Trust your instincts

Unearthing the painful: from PhD to book

8 October 2018 Leave a Comment

Sandra Arnold

Many New Zealanders have first-hand experience of earthquakes and through television have seen the devastation caused by hurricanes, floods, typhoons and tsunamis. The stories that come out of these disasters are similar to the stories I read during my research into parental bereavement for my PhD thesis. First, in terms of reaction, there’s the initial paralysing shock and fear of the future, then there’s struggling to survive, and finally, for most people, there’s rebuilding. In grieving any kind of major disaster it can take a long time to determine how to make life work again in a world that has irrevocably changed.

For many people who experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch in 2010 and 2011, and the thousands of aftershocks, part of that determining involved talking about what happened. Others felt it was too raw to talk about. Some who didn’t experience the quakes wanted to hear all the details. Others wished people would change the subject. Some tried to educate themselves on the causes and effects of earthquakes. Words outside our normal vocabulary peppered the stories we told each other.

A Box of Bones (Part 2)

8 October 2018 4 Comments

Sue Wootton

This essay continues from Part 1, which you can read here.

At some point most evenings I would put down my pen and pull the box of bones towards me. The lid had a small brass hook which fastened to a matching brass eye on the base. I tapped the hook edgeways and, as it fell free of the eye, felt the box give, as if I’d unbuttoned a tight corset. Apart from the foot and the hand, whose bones had been wired together, the bones lay separated and higgledy-piggeldy. I might pick up whatever happened to be lying on the top, a rib perhaps, or the femur. At other times I needed to look more closely at a specific part of the body, and so I would fish around for that particular bone.

The knocking sound of bone on bone and bone on box comes back to me as I recall this. With practice I became good at fishing blind, my eyes on Gray’s Anatomy and one hand in the box, delving. The scapula is like a large empty scallop shell. The humerus and the fibula are long sticks. The humerus is thicker, and knobbled top and bottom. The fibula is more like a giant’s toothpick or knitting needle. A patella sits comfortably in the palm of the hand, and has a satisfying contoured shape, like a large limpet. I noticed, too, the patella’s heft, its stone-like solidity. Most of the rest of the bones in the box didn’t feel this way. They were very light in the hand, almost like holding sticks of chalk. Had they been buried, or cremated, of course, they would be less than chalk by now. They’d be dust. Perhaps beyond dust: loam, clay. Shakespeare has Hamlet imagine Alexander’s bones fully recycled in the earth, becoming clay to stop a bunghole. To what base uses we may return, Horatio.

A Box of Bones (part 1)

1 October 2018 8 Comments

Sue Wootton

Searching recently for a good read-aloud children’s story, I pulled from the bottom of the bookshelf How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban. Young Tom lives with his aunt, Miss Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She’s no soft-hearted dearest Auntie Fidge. She is aways, strictly, Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, a woman who “wore an iron hat, and took no nonsense from anyone.” In Quentin Blake’s illustrations she’s a big-beamed human battleship wearing a rivetted-on grey dress and a high grey helmet. Tom – colourful, cheeky, cheerful – is clearly dancing circles around her. Readers naturally side with Tom. He’s all risk and movement. He’s teetering and testing, nimble, flexible, curious and persistent. He’s full of life. Poor old Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong makes flowers droop and trees shiver. Ridiculous in her rigid posture, bound tight by her unbending rules, she represents a fatal stillness of the soul, a kind of living death.

When I was eighteen, I found myself in the presence of a someone very like Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She taught anatomy at the school of physiotherapy where I was enrolled as a first year student. Wide-hipped and waistless, with an imposing ledge of a bosom, whenever she walked into the room we tender blossoms drooped. She stomped, each footstep an insult to the floor. I would eventually learn to figure out where a person was hurting by watching them walk: low back, tummy, ribcage, shoulder, neck, head, hip, knee, archilles tendon – the site of pain always lends a signature adjustment to the gait. But even as-yet untrained, I could tell that Ms Anatomy Wonkham-Strong was through-and-through sore. Some long-ago irritation had lodged within her, had spread through her entire body, and vibrated out into any environment through which she moved.

The treasures we surround ourselves with …

24 September 2018 3 Comments

Max Reid

woodcut by Janet de Wagt — Woodcut by Janet de Wagt

Some years ago, I was managing a large not-for-profit aged residential care facility in Wellington. We offered a range of rest home, hospital and dementia level care, and we were operating in a very competitive market, a market increasingly dominated by private ‘for profit’ aged care providers.

A perennial question for organisations in the aged residential care sector – be they private or not-for-profit – is, ‘What makes what we offer distinctive?’ Even earlier in my career, while undertaking a business degree, I remember a marketing lecturer defining the three key aspects of ‘market distinctiveness’:

You have to be either the biggest, demonstrably the best, or the most innovative.”

Sound enough concepts in themselves, perhaps, but somewhat difficult in a sector (like aged residential care) where virtually every aspect of the service you provide is detailed in standardised specifications and contracts, and then audited to within an inch of a contract’s life.