Fiction - Corpus

Jane Austen’s satire on hypochondria

21 November 2016 Leave a Comment

Jocelyn Harris

Between 27 January and 18 March 1817, Jane Austen wrote her final, unfinished, novel Sanditon, meaning a town built upon sand. This blistering satiric anatomy links hypochondria, property speculation, and consumerism—invalids seek out seaside resorts, property prices rise, and developers cash in on the new health fads of sea air and sea-bathing. In Sanditon, Austen demonstrates her modernity, her courage, and her worldliness. Yet again.

Jane Austen knew all about hypochondriacs, because Mrs. Austen was one. I cannot forgive her for occupying the sofa after a busy day gardening, while Jane lay dying on two chairs shoved together (Jane died on 18 July 1817). But as Mary Musgrove says in Persuasion, “I am very far from well; and Jemima has told me that the butcher says there is a bad sore-throat about. I dare say I shall catch it; and my sore-throats, you know, are always worse than anybody else’s.”

Waipiata Sanatorium: through a novelist’s eye

14 November 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

Some places exert a particularly strong pull on the imagination. One such site is Orangapai, the former tuberculosis sanitorium at Waipiata, positioned in the grand, high-sky landscape of the Maniototo, Otago, New Zealand. The sanitorium inspired Emily Duncan to pen her playscript Waipiata. For novelist Laurence Fearnley, Orangapai was the genesis for her 2007 novel Edwin + Matilda.
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Literature of Crisis

24 October 2016 4 Comments

Maxine Alterio

Our compulsion to make meaning of traumatic events through the reflective process of writing fiction and creative non-fiction fascinates me as a reader, and as a novelist. The reasons for the latter are multi-faceted and depend on the project. In my second novel, for example, I combined an interest in nurses who served overseas in the First World War with memories of a Southern New Zealand childhood and family stories about my maternal grandmother who ran a private nursing home in Riverton and said ‘Where’s your grit?’ if anyone complained of hardship. She had no time for wimps. Her generation had intimate knowledge of loves and lives lost in the 1914-1918 slaughter.

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Working between science and the soul

22 August 2016 Leave a Comment

Dr Leah Kaminsky

A physician works at the border between science and the soul … the wise doctor probes not only the organs of his patient but also his feelings and emotions, his fears and hopes, his regrets and his goals. And to accomplish that most important task of applying wisdom, the physician also needs to take his own emotional temperature.” – Jerome Groopman, in the foreword to Writer, M. D., a collection of works by doctor-writers edited by Melbourne GP and writer Leah Kaminsky.

Kaminsky writes: Writing for me can be a kind of thermometer, where I check the rising mercury of my own beliefs, biases and uncertainties. It is not a place I hope to find answers—rather, I use the blank page to try and understand what kind of questions a doctor needs to ask. My medicine has always fed and informed my writing. But more importantly, literature has, I hope, made me a better physician.

Novels and medicine

18 July 2016 2 Comments

Dr Joe Baker

All you need to know about General Practice can be learnt from reading Austen.”

So said Anne, my GP training supervisor. Needless to say when it came to the final exam I fared poorly with the medical emergencies, although I did better with those patients who had complex interpersonal relationship problems.

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Why studying Milton and Plath might make you a better doctor

4 July 2016 1 Comment

Dr Jacob Edmond

I coordinate a University of Otago English paper, ENGL131: Controversial Classics, which is an approved eighth paper for Health Science First Year. As I posted on the course Facebook page, ENGL131 fosters the skills that a recent report suggests are the best predictors of success in the health professions: critical thinking, analysis, and communication.