Medical Humanities - Corpus

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy – and a little art with our medicine

28 November 2016 1 Comment

Dr Cindy Towns

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is thought to account for 1-2 percent of acute coronary syndromes (ACS), ACS being medicalese for what most people would call ‘heart attacks’.

Takotsubo as a diagnosis got its name from a Japanese Octopus pot which looks a little like the Takotsubo heart on echocardiography (essentially an ultrasound). Takotsubo has some more creative synonyms, including acute stress cardiomyopathy, broken heart syndrome and ‘scared to death’. It mimics a traditional heart attack but is not due to coronary artery disease. Rather, the structure of the heart balloons in places. Classically, physically or emotionally distressing events precede the presentation, but the exact mechanism of the condition remains speculative. It has been associated with earthquakes in both Japan and New Zealand.

Poetry=Medicine?

21 November 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

“Poetry=Medicine”: this was the title of an event with which I was involved as part of last weekend’s 2016 Litcrawl festival in Wellington. We were four poets, plus MC and essayist Paul Stanley-Ward: a doctor, a physiotherapist, a chaplain and a literary scholar.

Medicine can be sweet: a balm, a pharmaceutical concoction that soothes and relaxes, that allows you to temporarily forget your aches and enjoy your life. Medicine can be harsh: strong chemicals, purgative or bitter tonic. Medicine always has side effects, because any attempt to tweak a part always sends ripples through the whole.

Poetry=Medicine? Here are some of the ways we tested that equation.

[Read more…] about Poetry=Medicine?

Swapping the scalpel for the pen: a surgeon writes

3 October 2016 4 Comments

Kevin Pringle

The first poem I wrote about a patient was when I was working in Iowa City at the University of Iowa as a professor of Paediatric Surgery. Matt was a classmate of our younger daughter Fiona in Junior High (roughly equivalent to New Zealand’s Intermediate). He developed a tumour on one of his ribs, which I attempted to remove, unsuccessfully.

Bittersweet. Bitter more than sweet.
I did my best, and felt I let you down.”

– from “Matt” by Kevin Pringle

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.

4 doctor writers: Oliver Sacks, Paul Kalanithi, Gavin Francis and David Galler

8 August 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

There is a long and noble tradition of doctors who write about medicine. The best of this writing brings to the page powerful insights about what it means to be a human being—the kind of insights that are sparked when the steel of medical science is struck by the flint of medicine’s art. Language is one of the key medical arts, and memoir and essays make wonderful genres for the development of such sparks.

Curricular Conundrums: the place of Humanities in Medicine 20 years on

1 August 2016 1 Comment

Barbara Brookes and Charlotte Paul

‘The Faculty of Medicine is undertaking major course revision’. This statement is from a 1995 University of Otago memo. Part of this revision focus was a proposal that the Humanities Division provide a suite of Elective papers for third year medical students. There was already a self-directed option on offer, in which—in consultation with a willing staff member—students had 10 hours a week for five weeks to follow a particular interest. As classes had grown in size, this system had become unwieldy and it was suggested that a more systematic programme of Humanities Electives would broaden students’ appreciation of the art, as well as the science, of medicine.