Reading - Corpus

Curing Lesesucht (addiction to reading)

29 October 2018 3 Comments

Charlotte Simmonds

Fischel Schneersohn was born around 1885/88 in Kamianets Podolski under the Russian Empire. He studied medicine in Berlin from 1908. By 1920 he was in Kiev, working as a children’s doctor and co-editing the short-lived Hebrew literary journal Kadima. He then returned to Berlin to direct a Jewish children’s centre. He is variously recorded as having specialised in psychiatry and psychology; the non-fiction books and articles he published in both Yiddish and German certainly belong more to the field of psychology than psychiatry. But he was also interested in non-scientific literature, with many of his Yiddish novels published in the 1920s and 30s, also in German and Hebrew translation.

In the 1930s he emigrated to Mandate Palestine where he continued to practise either child psychiatry or psychology, running a clinic and afterschool programme in Tel Aviv for neurotic children. In 1952, he wrote a lengthy German report on a syndrome which could not be considered today to have any nosological validity. It was a type of Lesesucht, or reading addiction, observed among the children in his Tel Aviv clinic over 1937 to 1951.

Mind That Child: A Medical Memoir

15 October 2018 1 Comment

Patricia Thwaites

During her recent trip to the United Nations, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern used her speech to recommit the government to making New Zealand the “best place in the world to be a child”, ensuring that:

no matter where you are born in the world, your local school is the best school, there is food and a health system that you can rely on and perhaps most importantly that you are loved and that you are heard”.

Leading New Zealand paedriatrician Dr Simon Rowley would no doubt agree with those sentiments. The welfare of babies and children is at the heart of his recently published book, Mind That Child: A Medical Memoir. Few would be more qualified to provide some guidelines on how to improve on present conditions.

The herb garden

15 October 2018 6 Comments

Beatrice Hale

As a nine and ten year old I spent six months in the local Children’s Hospital in Aberdeen. Rheumatic fever was one of the nasties at that time, and a number of the children in the ward were victims, all of us on bed rest, the treatment at that time. One method of self-amusement was reading. The Dimsie books, by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, were among the one or two books a week that my favourite aunt brought in for me.

From Dimsie Goes to School to Dimsie Grows Up and Dimsie Carries On, Dimsie has remained a favourite with me for many years.

The most influential was Dimsie Grows Up. The morality of the tale strikes me afresh every time I look at the book. Dimsie could not fulfil her ambition to become a doctor; her father had died and left very little money. Sadly, reluctantly, but determined to be cheerful and not to moan (moral message here!), Dimsie decides to join her mother in the old family home in Perthshire. She begins to travel north from her school on the south coast of England, but a train strike intervenes. A fellow traveller hires a car and several passengers abandon the train journey and drive north with him. He just happens to be a doctor who eventually takes up a practice in Perthshire. No prizes for guessing one of the story’s themes.

[Read more…] about The herb garden

Books as friends … and medicine

1 October 2018 3 Comments

Grace Carlyle

When I was a child I discovered three authors who have voyaged with me through life. What a debt of gratitude I owe these women who have strengthened, enriched, educated, supported and amused me for so long. I have since found other authors, some considered ‘worthier’, and deeply enjoyed them, but in difficult times I return to my old friends of childhood and reread them with undiminished delight. I don’t believe that the secret of the power is merely nostalgia. It’s something much simpler: they work. I take them like medicine. In fact I prefer them to any medicine I have ever experienced.

Where to begin? At an impressionable age I discovered Georgette Heyer and fell in love with her wit, her style, the historic settings, the sheer romanticism of her novels. Which was maybe a bit unfortunate as it took a little time to learn that the men I were reading about weren’t likely to walk into my life. What a sad day it was when I realised that. It required extensive rereading to cheer myself up, by which time the old familiar spell was working upon me all over again, albeit somewhat more realistically. But Heyer’s humour never failed to give me a lift when the going became heavy. While my reasons for returning to her kept changing, the effect remained consistent. I felt better for the reading. [Read more…] about Books as friends … and medicine

“That other anatomy”: how can spirituality sit alongside science?

1 October 2018 4 Comments

Kirstie McKinnon

Mindfulness teaches us to notice our thoughts. Recently I read Switch on Your Brain by Dr Caroline Leaf. She proposes a step by step scenario in which we notice, yes, our thoughts, but go further, to notice the attitude of our thoughts, and then go further, to change the thoughts. Radical stuff, she calls it DIY neurosurgery.

It’s a difficult book for me to endorse because it’s not secular. Caroline Leaf quotes the Bible throughout and is very sure. I’m wary of anyone who’s sure of anything. Yet I learnt from engagement with the deep focused thinking programme she outlines. I’ve puzzled over this, a lot.

A Box of Bones (part 1)

1 October 2018 8 Comments

Sue Wootton

Searching recently for a good read-aloud children’s story, I pulled from the bottom of the bookshelf How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban. Young Tom lives with his aunt, Miss Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She’s no soft-hearted dearest Auntie Fidge. She is aways, strictly, Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, a woman who “wore an iron hat, and took no nonsense from anyone.” In Quentin Blake’s illustrations she’s a big-beamed human battleship wearing a rivetted-on grey dress and a high grey helmet. Tom – colourful, cheeky, cheerful – is clearly dancing circles around her. Readers naturally side with Tom. He’s all risk and movement. He’s teetering and testing, nimble, flexible, curious and persistent. He’s full of life. Poor old Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong makes flowers droop and trees shiver. Ridiculous in her rigid posture, bound tight by her unbending rules, she represents a fatal stillness of the soul, a kind of living death.

When I was eighteen, I found myself in the presence of a someone very like Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She taught anatomy at the school of physiotherapy where I was enrolled as a first year student. Wide-hipped and waistless, with an imposing ledge of a bosom, whenever she walked into the room we tender blossoms drooped. She stomped, each footstep an insult to the floor. I would eventually learn to figure out where a person was hurting by watching them walk: low back, tummy, ribcage, shoulder, neck, head, hip, knee, archilles tendon – the site of pain always lends a signature adjustment to the gait. But even as-yet untrained, I could tell that Ms Anatomy Wonkham-Strong was through-and-through sore. Some long-ago irritation had lodged within her, had spread through her entire body, and vibrated out into any environment through which she moved.