Medical Humanities - Corpus

“Visitors”: a short story

18 June 2018 5 Comments

Jordan Reid

The grey light slowly creeps into the room from the window behind the couch. A table, chairs, and a small cluttered kitchen slowly emerge from the darkness. They’re colourless, kept in shadow by the thick curtains that hang in front of the windows behind the sink and by the table. The room is silent, bar the muted tick, tick, tick of a clock you found at a church fair in other days.

Soon, the ticks are overlaid by a soft scuff, scuff, scuff and the quiet creak of a wheel on your frame. You stop, steady yourself, the door opens. You’re hunched over, grey and shapeless like your furniture.

“All hitched up”: a chemotherapy story

11 June 2018 5 Comments

Elizabeth Brooke-Carr

How many New Zealanders are receiving chemotherapy this week for cancer and other conditions? The number must be in the thousands. Yet this common medical intervention can never be a commonplace experience, evoking as it does such wildly fluctuating levels of both hope and anxiety.

Poet Elizabeth Brooke-Carr writes of receiving her first round: [Read more…] about “All hitched up”: a chemotherapy story

Reading recoveries

11 June 2018 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Fiction might be ‘all made up’, but a great novel illuminates reality like nothing else. How? For Milan Kundera, literature is essential to humanity’s body of knowledge precisely because it does not represent scientific thinking. Fiction’s power is in its resistance to reductionist thought and its willingness to engage with life’s complexity. Novelists weave and layer a multitude of observations about the lived human condition. The truer and more attentive these observations, the more complex the fiction, and the less certain its conclusions. Indeed, according to Kundera, the novel’s wisdom is “the wisdom of uncertainty”.

This doesn’t sound like much to lean on. Yet it turns out that in times of trouble being able to access the wisdom of uncertainty is an invaluable resource.

[Read more…] about Reading recoveries

Taonga for learning: the Otago Medical School Anatomy Museum

28 May 2018 Leave a Comment

Louisa Baillie

The W. D. Trotter Anatomy Museum at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, contains a collection that is truly a confluence of science and the humanities. The museum houses over 3,000 catalogued anatomy specimens and models in an elegant space whose warm aesthetics include diffuse natural lighting, wooden framed glass cabinets and rimu stairs leading to a mezzanine floor.

The models themselves are works of art as well as teachers of science. They include wax models by the Ziegler and Tramond studios, 77 authentic painted plaster models by the Leipzig firm of Steger, clastique papier-mache´models by Louis Auzoux’s factory, as well as many in-house wet and plastinated specimens, and models made of fibreglass, wax and even hand-carved wood.

The recovery journey: “In My Room” by Jim Lucey

28 May 2018 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

There is no health without mental health.” – Jim Lucey (Irish Times interview, 2017)

Dr Jim Lucey is an Irish psychiatrist who has spent over three decades working in his chosen field of healthcare. In his 2014 book, In My Room: the Recovery Journey as Encountered by a Psychiatrist, Lucey outlines some of what he has learned during this time. He calls the book, which is framed as a collection of anonymised case studies, “an authentic description of the journey from distress to recovery as I have witnessed it”.

The room of the title is both the actual room of the clinic and the metaphorical ‘room’ of the mind. We all visit the former from time to time, but we must be able to live permanently in, or with, the latter. Lucey is compassionately interested in the various ways his patients learn to manage that challenge. He has much to share about the nature of recovery and of keeping well. [Read more…] about The recovery journey: “In My Room” by Jim Lucey

Atlas – a literary medical journal

30 April 2018 2 Comments

Helen Ker

Atlas is a literary medical journal, published in print and sold in bookstores around New Zealand, that offers an alternative to the usual scientific discourse that surrounds our bodies. It hopes to shift medical conversations away from the rigid and prescriptive to a literary form that accommodates our human complexities.

I started Atlas in my third year of medical school because I was beginning to see that certain parts of the illness experience are missed through our predominantly scientific ways of theorising illness and treating people. I realised that this had the potential to undermine the quality of patient care because illness is far more than just a pathological process.