Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks

4 November 2019 Leave a Comment

Robert McAllister

Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks. Image courtesy Adelaide Camera Club.

Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks was a teenage pioneer in radio transmission, a noted researcher and expert in nutrition (knighted for his work), and a tour de force in nutrition and catering for the Australian force during the Second World War. He was born in 1892 in the Mosgiel nursing home of his grandmother, Adelaide Hicks, and lived with his parents in Ravensbourne, a suburb of Dunedin. His father was a photographer and journalist for the Otago Witness. The young Stanton Hick’s junior education was at a Ravensbourne school, from where he earned a scholarship for secondary schooling at Otago Boys High School (government funded secondary education didn’t come in until 1913).

In his mid-teens, at a time when shore-to-shore wireless had yet to come to New Zealand, he and two friends developed an interest in wireless transmission. They read up about it at the Atheneum, gleaned the necessary materials from around Dunedin, and each built a transmitter and receiver. One was at Ravensbourne, one at Andersons Bay, and one at Caversham. News leaked out, and in 1908 they were asked to demonstrate to the mayors of Dunedin and Ravensbourne, the shipping companies, the harbourmaster and others. The demonstration was a great success, and they transmitted a message for parliament. This was relayed on by telegraph and they received congratulations from the prime minister. A 4,560 word article in the press reported the achievement.

No Friend But The Mountains: seeking the human in asylum

7 October 2019 1 Comment

Mira Harrison

No Friend But The Mountains is an extraordinary book by a remarkable author. Behrouz Boochani has now won four major Australian literary prizes – including the 2019 Victorian Prize, worth $125,000 – for his first-hand account of his asylum-seeking journey. The Kurdish writer’s manuscript was painstakingly tapped into thousands of text messages on a cell phone from within Manus Prison, where he has been held captive since 2013. Omid Tofighian, who translated the messages from Farsi, describes the experience of working with Boochani as being ‘rich with multiple narratives’ as they consulted, collaborated and constructed the text for publication. Working oceans apart, these two academics – one a researcher at Sydney University; the other a writer, journalist and scholar held in an Australian offshore prison – developed close bonds.

Prison writing is one possible genre this book could fall into. Boochani and Tofighian have refused to call Manus a detention centre, refugee camp, or other name which might soften the harsh reality that Manus is a prison, where innocent people have been kept against their will under inhumane conditions. The descriptions of life inside Manus Prison compare with those in Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. All are extraordinary accounts of extraordinary experiences. They are harrowing, yet enlightening to read, helping us value our everyday freedoms and the basic human rights we take for granted.

Crossing to surgery’s side

7 October 2019 1 Comment

Jane Simpson

Months after a serious accident, despite doing all the prescribed exercises, my right shoulder was getting worse. Simple movements caused sharp pain. Physios continued to hold out the hope of healing for this ‘small’ tear of my rotator cuff. I doubted that it would repair and said I wanted surgery. The path seemed to be blocked.

What I had waited so many months for became imminent at the second appointment with the surgeon. An MRI showed that the rotator cuff damage was much more serious than expected, and so he brought the date of surgery forward by two months. As I passed back through the spacious reception area, its white walls with their innocuous paintings suddenly became huge shadow boards of clamps, hammers, saws and numerous surgical instruments – like the ‘Cut Outs’ series by the New Zealand artist Richard Killeen.

What was I afraid of? Fear of surgery, of it all going wrong? If I were to write a poem about fear, what verbs, metaphors and myths would I use? Could I use synaesthesia and mix the senses up? If so, what was the smell of fear, what was its taste? Metallic? [Read more…] about Crossing to surgery’s side

“The Track”: word-walking through pain

7 October 2019 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

I counted my footsteps and made alphabetical lists of things (one two three ant, one two three bee) without missing a single beat.” – Paula Green, The Track.

In 2015, poet Paula Green set out to walk the 70 km-long Queen Charlotte Track at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. The track winds from bay to bay from Meretoto/Ship Cove to Anakiwa, a 3-5 day walk through a beautiful and historic landscape. All went according to plan until, on the longest day and during a violent storm, Paula slipped, sustaining two foot fractures. Ten hours of painful walking lay ahead.

Before her accident, Paula was already walking as a poet, collecting images and stories as she traversed the track. The “slap / of pain in the midst / of walking” changed everything. From this moment on, Paula is, quite literally, word-walking out of the bush. The alphabet itself becomes a crutch, rhythm becomes a painkiller, and each line lays down another small segment of the track underfoot.

Paula’s recently-published poetry collection, The Track, is an account of this journey.

Emergency Accommodation

7 October 2019 1 Comment

Barbara Brookes

When the government used to own hospital facilities and tourist resorts it was possible to transfer patients between these sites, especially in a time of national emergency, such as the Second World War. An earthquake struck Wellington on on the 24 June 1942, followed by a second on June 26, silencing the chimes of the Wellington post office clock, bringing down chimneys, disrupting the railways and severely damaging the Porirua Mental Hospital. During the second earthquake, a child was snatched by its mother from its bed “which a moment later was crushed under a mass of brickwork”. The 1,477 patients living at the hospital were reported to have remained “surprisingly calm” during the quake but evacuations began immediately because of the extensive damage to the building. Fifty-nine female patients were sent to Sunnyside in Christchurch and 50 to Kingseat in Auckland. After the second earthquake 100 male patients were sent to Stoke in Nelson and 100 to a former Salvation Army Inebriates’ Home on ‘Roto Roa Island’ in the Hauraki Gulf, but more accommodation was urgently required.

The Minister of Health announced that “the most suitable” and “amenable” patients would be sent to Wairakei (near Rotorua) and to the Chateau Tongariro. Dr D.G. McLachlan, from the Porirua Hospital, was appointed the superintendent at the Chateau Tongariro and advertisements were placed by the Tourist and Publicity Department announcing that the Hotel would be closed to the public from 15 September 1942 “until further notice”. Women, it seemed, were suitably ‘amenable’ and 200 were to be sent to the Chateau and 100 to Wairakei.

“In the Night Kitchen”: an allegory for the patient experience?

2 September 2019 1 Comment

Emily Duncan

Did you ever hear of Mickey, how he … fell through the dark, out of his clothes past the moon and his mama and papa sleeping tight into the light of the night kitchen?”

Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen is one of those masterpieces I revisit in adulthood. Its rhythm and phrasing were tattooed on my young mind. There’s a recording of the text by the late actor James Gandolfini. Even though it was only a few years ago that I heard this, and I’m a Gandolfini fan, the petulant child in my wanted to protest, “You’re reading it all wrong!”

The appeal of In the Night Kitchen isn’t merely sentimental whimsy, but Sendak’s complicit understanding of what our parents wouldn’t admit. He encourages us to embrace the (unspoken) fear of night-time and face uncanny and surreal happenings in the dark.

Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what’s real and what’s not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.” Bernard Holland.

I think of the book when in hospital. Suspended in insomnia in a seventh floor isolation room, looking over the ‘night kitchen’ of Dunedin North. Like Mickey meeting the bakers, I’m alert to the labour that continues under focused beams of light while most of us sleep. There’s that that must go on. And fear. Hospital is discomforting no matter your age, so I ask: could In the Night Kitchen be read as an allegory for the patient experience?