conversations about medicine and life

Find your dibbler!

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Sue Wootton

dibber
A wooden dibbler, or dibber.

It’s Labour Day in New Zealand. This is the long weekend that announces the approach of summer. It’s  time to pack away the winter duvet, dust off the camping equipment, sort out the seed potatoes and find your dibbler – you do remember where you put your dibbler, right?

However you spend the day, the public holiday is a reminder to honour the dignity and meaning of work. So whether you’re rostered on or enjoying a break, we recommend the following articles about working in healthcare,

Sue Wootton is co-editor of Corpus.

The herb garden

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Beatrice Hale

Dimsie Grows UpAs a nine and ten year old I spent six months in the local Children’s Hospital in Aberdeen. Rheumatic fever was one of the nasties at that time, and a number of the children in the ward were victims, all of us on bed rest, the treatment at that time. One method of self-amusement was reading. The Dimsie books, by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, were among the one or two books a week that my favourite aunt brought in for me.

From Dimsie Goes to School to Dimsie Grows Up and Dimsie Carries On, Dimsie has remained a favourite with me for many years.

The most influential was Dimsie Grows Up. The morality of the tale strikes me afresh every time I look at the book. Dimsie could not fulfil her ambition to become a doctor; her father had died and left very little money. Sadly, reluctantly, but determined to be cheerful and not to moan (moral message here!), Dimsie decides to join her mother in the old family home in Perthshire. She begins to travel north from her school on the south coast of England, but a train strike intervenes. A fellow traveller hires a car and several passengers abandon the train journey and drive north with him. He just happens to be a doctor who eventually takes up a practice in Perthshire. No prizes for guessing one of the story’s themes.

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Lessons of Life from World of Warcraft

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Katherine Hall

World of WarcraftMuch 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…]

Books as friends … and medicine

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Grace Carlyle

When I was a child I discovered three authors who have voyaged with me through life. What a debt of gratitude I owe these women who have strengthened, enriched, educated, supported and amused me for so long. I have since found other authors, some considered ‘worthier’, and deeply enjoyed them, but in difficult times I return to my old friends of childhood and reread them with undiminished delight. I don’t believe that the secret of the power is merely nostalgia. It’s something much simpler: they work. I take them like medicine. In fact I prefer them to any medicine I have ever experienced.

Where to begin? At an impressionable age I discovered Georgette Heyer and fell in love with her wit, her style, the historic settings, the sheer romanticism of her novels. Which was maybe a bit unfortunate as it took a little time to learn that the men I were reading about weren’t likely to walk into my life. What a sad day it was when I realised that. It required extensive rereading to cheer myself up, by which time the old familiar spell was working upon me all over again, albeit somewhat more realistically. But Heyer’s humour never failed to give me a lift when the going became heavy. While my reasons for returning to her kept changing, the effect remained consistent. I felt better for the reading. [Read more…]

“That other anatomy”: how can spirituality sit alongside science?

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Kirstie McKinnon

Mindfulness teaches us to notice our thoughts. Recently I read Switch on Your Brain by Dr Caroline Leaf. She proposes a step by step scenario in which we notice, yes, our thoughts, but go further, to notice the attitude of our thoughts, and then go further, to change the thoughts. Radical stuff, she calls it DIY neurosurgery.

It’s a difficult book for me to endorse because it’s not secular. Caroline Leaf quotes the Bible throughout and is very sure. I’m wary of anyone who’s sure of anything. Yet I learnt from engagement with the deep focused thinking programme she outlines. I’ve puzzled over this, a lot.

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