Medical Humanities

Happy birthday to Corpus!

16 May 2026 12 Comments

Sue Wootton

Corpus: Conversations about medicine and life is ten years old! When Barbara Brookes and I launched this site in May 2016, our idea was to open a space dedicated to kōrero about health and medicine, a ‘digital salon’ that would welcome people from all walks of life to share their ways of knowing about anything related to these concepts. What strikes me, as I browse back through a decade’s worth of stories, is what a vivid picture has emerged on these pages — a tapestry that shows what truly matters to human beings. Each story is a stitch in that tapestry; each piece enriches the overall picture. And I’m delighted to say that the overall picture looks set to continue to grow.

Corpus stories have been written by patients and caregivers; by health professionals (including GPs, nurses, surgeons, dentists, physiotherapists, counsellors, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists); by research scientists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, public health experts and literature scholars; by gardeners, musicians, poets, novelists, singers, artists and dancers. So many ways of thinking about how to sustain ourselves, or how to nourish others, when the chips are down. There is much diversity here, a wealth of insightful commentary from a range of perspectives. Yet one message comes through loud and clear across the board, and it’s that effective medicine involves taking care of every aspect of being human: body and mind, culture and belief, belonging and purpose, creativity and imagination, family, friends and community. [Read more…] about Happy birthday to Corpus!

An invitation into a patient’s garden

1 September 2024 1 Comment

Lucy O’Hagan

Early in his memoir Native Son: The writer’s memoir, Witi Ihimaera introduced me to the idea that stories have a whakapapa. I had an image of a story travelling through generations of tellers and listeners, told in different places: a dinner table, a classroom, a wharenui, a road trip or perhaps as a whisper in a bed. And I imagine each teller and listener moulds that story into something that makes sense to them in their time and place.

I was recently told a metaphorical sort of story by my friend, the thoughtful and passionate GP, Nigel Thompson. It was a story that had been told to him by Richard Bolstad, who had been given the story by psychotherapist George Sweet. I don’t know Richard Bolstad at all, but if he is someone who passed a story from George to Nigel, I feel I would like him a lot.

In the frame

1 March 2021 4 Comments

Trish Harris

Last month I visited the hospital. Even when the reasons are straightforward, the experience is never without echoes.

Frame #1:

I am sitting in the café in Wellington Hospital’s atrium. From my table I can see an inner courtyard of tables and chairs and a sculpture of arches and lintel. The sculpture is actually a section of the old hospital entranceway, a familiar sight from when I was admitted as a child. But I am not a child. In this frame I am a poet, the writer of My Wide White Bed, a book of poems about being in hospital. Today I am here to talk to a staff member about the possibility of framing some of them for display in hospital corridors. Poems that will ring a little bell for today’s inpatients: We have a voice; you are seen. That’s what they’ll trill. Well, that’s the hope.

Frame #2:

After the café meeting, I head to my orthopaedic outpatient’s appointment. In this frame I am a patient. I answer the prioritisation form, trying to make my life fit onto a sliding scale. All I want is a referral to Orthotics, who have made my shoes for the past twenty-five years.

The registrar comes in, offers a smile and handshake. He examines my hands, says good tendons, fingers not crooked. Surgeries? Hips, four, I say, two revisions. He moves to my feet. Flat feet, he says, stiff. What about pain? Difficult to get around? I’ve adapted, I say, it’s different for someone whose life has been upended recently or for whom it keeps changing. I’ve had this for fifty-two years. I know how to do it.

Afterwards I think, why did I go on about coping? A friend says, he was looking at you through one frame and you were trying to get him to look through another.

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“This is not how I imagined medical school”

20 July 2020 2 Comments

Ollie McCullough

20 July 2023

This is not how I imagined medical school. I thought it was going to have more cardiac arrests, more trauma and more helicopters. Instead, my days as a trainee intern are spent writing up discharge summaries for consultants who I mostly never see. We’re meant to have our own patients – take a history, examine and diagnose. But the hospital is saturated with junior medical staff and deficient in patients. I guess it’s not a bad thing. Ever since we found a way to treat disease by providing treatment specific to a patient’s genetic code we haven’t seen anywhere near the amount of patients that we used to. Well, so the consultants say. But still, I sometimes wish something big would happen.

On not being Ashley

27 April 2020 26 Comments

Lucy O’Hagan

It’s 5 April, 2020. The country is in lockdown. Waiting. The pandemic hasn’t quite reached our shores but I feel a need to rise to the occasion, offer my services at the front line instead of faffing around as I have been, writing a book about being a doctor while doing little of it, and teaching others how to do it while wondering if I still have that sharpness in me, that quick pattern recognition, that diagnostic edge, that confidence that I know what I don’t know, drug doses at my fingertips, that glorious feeling that I can do all of this and simultaneously manage the unexpected, the macabre, the lost and the uncertain.

I had imagined myself as a pandemic doctor giving unction to the dying in virus-infested houses, but in reality I have spent the week doing telephone consultations at my kitchen table in my socks.

I want to be heroic, as doctors are meant to be, but actually I’m terrified at the idea of exposing myself to a lethal viral load while tending to those coughing and hoiking and drooling. Me, with no mask and no drugs. I have read the grueling stories of doctors in Italy and New York. But this is New Zealand and already some good keen bloke is in his shed making plastic face shields with his 3D printer and attaching these to small helmets and delivering them free to doctors around the country. I have one and I feel safer.

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“In the Night Kitchen”: an allegory for the patient experience?

2 September 2019 1 Comment

Emily Duncan

Did you ever hear of Mickey, how he … fell through the dark, out of his clothes past the moon and his mama and papa sleeping tight into the light of the night kitchen?”

Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen is one of those masterpieces I revisit in adulthood. Its rhythm and phrasing were tattooed on my young mind. There’s a recording of the text by the late actor James Gandolfini. Even though it was only a few years ago that I heard this, and I’m a Gandolfini fan, the petulant child in my wanted to protest, “You’re reading it all wrong!”

The appeal of In the Night Kitchen isn’t merely sentimental whimsy, but Sendak’s complicit understanding of what our parents wouldn’t admit. He encourages us to embrace the (unspoken) fear of night-time and face uncanny and surreal happenings in the dark.

Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what’s real and what’s not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.” Bernard Holland.

I think of the book when in hospital. Suspended in insomnia in a seventh floor isolation room, looking over the ‘night kitchen’ of Dunedin North. Like Mickey meeting the bakers, I’m alert to the labour that continues under focused beams of light while most of us sleep. There’s that that must go on. And fear. Hospital is discomforting no matter your age, so I ask: could In the Night Kitchen be read as an allegory for the patient experience?