Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Menstruation, myth, and medicine

2 December 2019 Leave a Comment

Sandy Thomson-Conklin

Otago Girls High School. Image courtesy McNab Collection.

I was twelve years old, munching away on some crackers in the back garden when I noticed an uncomfortable wetness in my knickers. I hopped to the loo and was surprised to discover that I had got my first period. I immediately grasped what had happened; my mother is a nurse and my family has a decidedly casual attitude towards the human body and its functions. I ran and proudly shared my news. Tearing up, Mum explained how I was now a young woman. Together we went over the practical accoutrements, and she presented me with a silver necklace adorned with hearts to mark the occasion (and satiate my rampant preteen consumerism). Though my experience of the bloody menses itself is not new or unique, I have learned that the openness and practical knowledge is. Roughly fifty percent of the world’s population is biologically female, and almost all females will menstruate for some 3,000 days in their lives. Most girls begin their monthly bleed between the ages of 11-16, and will continue to bleed for five (give or take) days each month for the next 30 years. Societally, menstrual blood is taboo. Historically, it has been taken as evidence of females being the ‘weaker sex.’ Keeping this shameful secret shrouded is a long-running custom. Time and time again inferiority has been upheld through religion, the medical profession, or internalised shame passed from mother to daughter.

In 1948, a young female medical student at the Otago School of Medicine, M. W. Wray, investigated menstruation as part of her fifth year Preventative Medicine dissertation. She found a serious lack of information about the average girl’s experience in New Zealand. Rather than accepting the status quo, Wray decided to collect some data. 120 permission slips were sent to parents of students at Otago Girls High School, requesting their daughters be interviewed about menstruation. A mere half of the permissions were returned signed, and fewer than sixty girls were interviewed.

Let there be light: macular degeneration and me

4 November 2019 6 Comments

Renée

Let there be warriors…

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be regarded as warriors.” Adrienne Rich.

I was taught to read before I was five by my mother Rose. I read stories, then long books, then joined the library, changed both Rose’s and my books, read both, went out to work at the woollen mill when I was twelve and read my way around libraries wherever I worked. I worked at all sorts of jobs then, when I was forty, began studying for an extra mural BA degree. I began teaching in my forties and at fifty I began writing plays. Since then I have read and written (worked) every day. Now I am 90. I’ve just finished teaching a course on writing memoir, and The Cuba Press has just published my first crime novel, The Wild Card.

Two years ago I was told I had macular degeneration.

This is a desolate and unhappy place to be. Being labelled ‘vision impaired’ doesn’t go anywhere near describing the impact of it on my life. As a reader and a working writer it is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

The Big Red Ride: a community bike programme

4 November 2019 5 Comments

Annie Tredray

For the past ten years, I’ve been a physiotherapist at Mineral Springs Hospital in Banff, Alberta; Canada. Witnessing long term care residents live a mostly sedentary life did not resonate well with me. I saw the effects repeatedly: deteriorating functionality and simple lack of satisfaction with daily living. Some people would beg me to take them outside and, once there, they would lament that they were no longer able to walk around and enjoy their surroundings. Despite often severe disabilities, it was obvious that residents still craved opportunities to be active outdoors.

In 2015 I attended an Exercise Prescription and Aging conference. There I learned some hard data about Canada’s fast-aging population. According to Statistics Canada, the number of 85-year-olds will more than double between 2016 and 2036. By 2036, 62 percent of all healthcare spending will be on those aged over 65. Furthermore, while many adults are healthy in their later years, there is also an increasing number of seniors living with fraility. Frailty comes with more complex health challenges. Both social connectivity and physical activity are necessary components for healthy aging for any adult over 65 years, whether or not they are frail.

Expressive Arts Therapy: Arts-based research and new motherhood

4 November 2019 6 Comments

Rata Gordon

Baby Ursula eating a page of careful research.

It’s dark. I can hear the whirr of the heater and an eager bird outside. The others are still asleep and I have sneaked down here to write. I recently described my tiredness as desperate. There are very few things I would give up sleep for at the moment, but one of them is writing. When I do it right, it gives me energy, rather than taking it away.

Writing that feels good to do is full-bodied. It comes from my slippered ankles, my warm insides, the space between my fingers, my chilly nape. It plants words that are alive on the page. Writing that feels bad to do – the kind that gives me a neck ache – feels like forming boring biscuits from just my brain.

Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” Hélène Cixous.

Ursula is nearly one now and my body has been ballooning out, birthing, spouting milk, withering, coming back to life. All I have is the time before she wakes up to do this, so I’m going to have to just let it slip out somehow. Speak, body!

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.