Review - Corpus

Public health priorities

6 May 2019 2 Comments

Barbara Brookes

How can it be that a public body appointed to set priorities for public health in New Zealand became described by a member of the same government that appointed it as “a bunch of cretins”?

The answer, epidemiologist and public health physician Sir David Skegg suggests in his compelling book The Health of the People (BWB Texts, 2019), is that politicians focused on personal health services take a short-term view, and ignore the longer-term factors that impact on the health status of the community. That preference for the short-term may be influenced by particular lobby groups – promoting food and alcohol, for example – industries whose interests would be endangered by regulation in the interests of health.

The Health of the People is motivated by concern that a focus on short-term medical services has left New Zealanders with almost no centralised planning and oversight of the kind that would have prevented what occurred in Havelock North in August 2016. In that disaster, 40 percent of residents became seriously ill because of unsafe drinking water, 45 people were hospitalised and at least three people died. While the issue hit the headlines when it occurred, the public learned little about the subsequent Inquiry, which found that the Ministry of Health failed in its duty of enforcing standards to ensure safe drinking water. The findings of the Inquiry were as invisible to the public as the bugs in the water.

Crip the Lit: Here we are, read us

1 April 2019 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

In 2016, frustrated by the lack of deaf and disabled writers represented in New Zealand writing, Trish Harris and Robyn Hunt founded ‘Crip the Lit‘. Sassy and bold, Crip the Lit is unashamedly remedial in purpose. “We want,” say Harris and Hunt, “to tell our stories our way”. I first encountered Crip the Lit through their presence at Wellington’s annual Lit Crawl festival. In the 2018 festival, for example, the Crip the Lit panel debated the moot that “there is no such thing as a disabled writer. We are all just writers.”

Crip the Lit’s newest venture is the publication of a ‘pocket book’ (available in multiple formats to suit many kinds of pockets): Here We Are, Read Us: Women, Disability and Writing.

“Poetry and Mindfulness”

19 November 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Whatever the advantages of the internet and the many technologies we use to leverage it, there is growing evidence that we are paying a price in distraction and in neurological changes that are affecting our ability to concentrate, to follow lengthy arguments – and perhaps even to empathize with each other.” – Bryan Walpert, Poetry and Mindfulness.

We citizens of the so-called developed world are living through a rapidly changing, fast-paced and information-dense time. We can trace the effects of this in our daily language. In a relatively short length of time, the digital age has appropriated certain key words, turning once qualitative terms into quantitative ones, and stretching the former meaning of words like ‘connection’ and ‘friend’ almost to breaking point. (I think also of terms once the province of human anatomy and communication, like ‘digital’, ‘fingerprint’, ‘face recognition’ and ‘voice technology’; and the emotional words ‘like’ and ‘love’.) Ostensibly we are the most connected and informed generations ever, yet loneliness, stress, cynicism, anxiety and depression seem endemic.

“With Them Through Hell”

5 November 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

11 November 2018 will mark one hundred years since the official end of the First World War. Over 18,000 New Zealand combatants were killed in the conflict, and many more were wounded or fell ill. Their experiences were so harrowing that most survivors, even years after returning to civilian life, would never speak of what they had endured during the ‘war to end all wars’.

Serving alongside them in that hellish world were the men and women of the New Zealand medical corps. A century on, Anna Roger has written a comprehensive history of this ‘other army’, which was charged, not with ending lives, but with saving them. The result is a rich tribute to the courage and compassion of those who worked “in appalling, perilous conditions and for inhumanely long hours” to alleviate the suffering of others.

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.

“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.