History - Corpus

The history of loneliness

23 July 2018 4 Comments

Barbara Brookes

When I saw a book entitled A History of Loneliness I immediately had to buy it – imagining the way social interaction had changed over time might be revealed to me. It was, of course, Irish author John Boyne’s novel, a sensitive and compelling exploration of Irish priesthood that enlarged my understanding.

I have thought about loneliness most often in relation to the history of early women doctors. The Alexander Turnbull Library holds a wonderful collection of letters of women who trained in medicine in Edinburgh in the 1890s. The letters were carefully preserved by Dr Agnes Bennett who practiced in Wellington from 1905 until 1936, with interruption for distinguished service in the first world war. Those letters led me to write about the ‘corresponding community’ the women created in order to continue the companionship they had so enjoyed at the Edinburgh Medical College for Women. The letters enabled them to maintain the sorority they had established as they embarked on their often lonely careers. Early women doctors were often exiles from the communities in which they were raised and from those in which they ended up practicing. Their male colleagues rarely welcomed them and as single women they were treated by suspicion by the wives of male colleagues.

The ‘coming out’ of pregnancy

2 July 2018 3 Comments

Barbara Brookes

Jacinda Ardern and Clarke Gayford — Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and her partner Clarke Gayford, at Buckingham Palace.

The April 2018 photo of heavily pregnant New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at Buckingham Palace was more than beautiful, it represented a landmark moment in political life. Pregnancy, once invisible, was centre stage.

In the early twentieth century, respectable citizens kept pregnancy under wraps. It was part of that troublesome thing: women’s bodies. Those bodies bled, ballooned during pregnancy, and leaked milk during lactation. None of these things seemed appropriate in public life. They appeared to make women closer to nature, while men assumed the mantle of culture. Women’s bodily changes were matters to be hidden, controlled, and best not discussed.

The Queen’s birth day

4 June 2018 4 Comments

Barbara Brookes

In New Zealand, the first weekend in June is Queen’s Birthday Weekend. Corpus is taking a short break today for the public holiday. We hope you are able to enjoy some time off too, perhaps shoring up on some precious, fortifying pre-solstice fresh air and sunshine to carry you through the next few months of winter.

92 years ago, in London, a ‘certain line of treatment’ ushered in the birth of a baby girl. Barbara Brookes explains:

At 2:40 am on 21st April 1926, the then Duchess of York gave birth to a daughter in her parents’ London residence at No. 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair. The popular 25 year old duchess had originally planned to give birth in convenient rented accommodation but her uncle, King Edward VIII, ‘strongly disapproved’ of the idea that a child ‘which might ascend the throne’ should be born in a ‘hired house’.

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.

War injuries – they ripple on

23 April 2018 5 Comments

Sue Walthert

Physician, poet and soldier John McCrae (1872-1918)

The moving poem “In Flanders Fields” was written in 1915 by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae for the men he buried in Ypres, Belgium, during World War 1. Recently our Flagstaff Community Choir has been singing the lyrics. In the second verse, a drum takes up the beat and the words connect with me.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

My Grandfather Pops, an ANZAC soldier, marched in Flanders fields and in Gallipoli. He was decorated twice for bravery, imprisoned once for forgery and twice badly wounded. He returned home, his life muddied by war. He tried to wash that mud away – unfortunately, with alcohol. His life was one of suffering and sadness. That suffering is still felt through the generations.

Homesickness

23 April 2018 5 Comments

Barbara Brookes

Who hasn’t suffered it? A longing for the quality of the light, the green of the country, the sound of the waves, the language of your origins, or for familiar food. Homesickness might strike at odd times and be triggered by the senses.

Watching Marina Willer’s Red Trees recently, a documentary about Willer’s Jewish refugee father who went to Brazil, I learned a new word, saudade, which her father said he felt for Europe. Saudade has no real English equivalent, though Wikipedia suggests ‘missingness’. In English we might think of nostalgia, a longing for past good times, but we do not have a day of official celebration of this emotion, as the Brazilians apparently do, on January 30^th.

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