Women's Health - Corpus

The Queen’s birth day

4 June 2018 4 Comments

Barbara Brookes

In New Zealand, the first weekend in June is Queen’s Birthday Weekend. Corpus is taking a short break today for the public holiday. We hope you are able to enjoy some time off too, perhaps shoring up on some precious, fortifying pre-solstice fresh air and sunshine to carry you through the next few months of winter.

92 years ago, in London, a ‘certain line of treatment’ ushered in the birth of a baby girl. Barbara Brookes explains:

At 2:40 am on 21st April 1926, the then Duchess of York gave birth to a daughter in her parents’ London residence at No. 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair. The popular 25 year old duchess had originally planned to give birth in convenient rented accommodation but her uncle, King Edward VIII, ‘strongly disapproved’ of the idea that a child ‘which might ascend the throne’ should be born in a ‘hired house’.

Free with his fists: trying to make sense of it (Part Two)

26 March 2018 5 Comments

Carolyn McCurdie

(Read the first part of Carolyn McCurdie’s reflections on this topic here.)

There are many, many victim-blaming questions that are asked. Most of them arise from cultural assumptions and I’m as much a product of this culture as anyone. There’s no blaming that anyone could do that I haven’t done to myself. One that caused me years of soul-searching is: but didn’t you see the signs? Surely you should have known.

Yes and no. With hindsight and maturity I can see that he was extremely narcissistic. Everything was about him. I didn’t recognise that. He was a heavy drinker. Every young man I knew was a heavy drinker. I wasn’t alert for trouble. I didn’t know I should be. There was no violence at all. This didn’t begin until about a year into the relationship. By that time I was committed.

So why didn’t I leave? Such a common question, and one much easier to answer.

Free with his fists: trying to make sense of it (Part One)

19 March 2018 1 Comment

Carolyn McCurdie

I told myself it wasn’t so bad. After he’d knocked me down, he never kicked me. He never broke bones, never did anything that needed medical attention. In eight years, he forgot discretion only twice. Then I had the black eyes, fat lip, swollen, discoloured face that the world could see. I hid inside, rang in sick, made carefree jokes about walking into cupboard doors.

But mostly he punched my upper arms. Often it had nothing much to do with anything I’d said or done. It was stress relief, when life hadn’t gone the way he thought it should. “Pete never allows for a stubbed toe, does he,” someone remarked when she’d witnessed the beginnings of a tantrum, controlled because people were there. I bought blouses with voluminous sleeves, because at those times my arms were too swollen to fit into ordinary sleeves.

Vitamin D deficiency rickets: a problem for our times

19 March 2018 Leave a Comment

Ben Wheeler

Bone needs an adequate supply of calcium and phosphate to mineralise properly. Failure of this mineral supply (for any reason) results in defects like osteomalacia (impaired mineralisation of the bone matrix) and osteoporosis (overall low bone mass). In children, inadequate mineralisation causes rickets. There are multiple causes of rickets, but the main one is vitamin D deficiency.

When ritual is the best vessel

12 March 2018 Leave a Comment

Susan Wardell

Medical anthropologist Dr Susan Wardell reviews Moon Circle: Rediscover Wildness, Intuition and Sisterhood by Lucy AitkenRead.

A moon circle is, by basic definition, a night-time gathering of women. Its roots as a cultural practice are very old, as old “as the ages”. Often outdoors, and comprising a mixture of symbolic activity and verbal sharing, the moon circle is making a resurgence in the contemporary West. AitkenRead’s book, unapologetically feminist in its goals, sets out to “rediscover wildness, intuition and sisterhood”:

We are purposely stepping into the river of womanhood that has twisted and turned throughout herstory.” – Lucy AitkenRead

For this kind of voyage, it seems ritual is the best vessel.

Sex education in schools: a student’s view

21 August 2017 5 Comments

Molly Wootton

I am 17, and lucky enough to have been brought up in a household where sex education was readily available. When I asked where babies came from I didn’t get some long-winded story about a stork, or a cabbage patch. I got the truth. This openness meant that I didn’t have to rely on puberty education at intermediate, or sex education at high school, but the fact is that our education system is many students’ only resource for learning about sex and our ever-changing bodies. However this power is not fully utilised. The curriculum still tends to shy away from some important aspects of sex education.