Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Stewart Peters: Unqualified practitioner of medicine, dentistry and pharmacy.

4 March 2019 4 Comments

Robert McAllister

Doctor Peters Stewart Peters was born in Scotland about 1860 and studied medicine at Glasgow University. He passed the first two professional exams but left the course before the final exam. He found work as a ship’s surgeon on a whaler named Resolute, which sailed to Davis Strait, between Greenland and Newfoundland, to carry out whaling for a season. There is a sequel to that later.

On his return to Dundee he decided to find work in New Zealand and sailed there on the SS Wellington in 1883. Gold had been discovered in Otago twenty-two years previously, and Dunedin, Mosgiel and Outram were thriving as support centres for fortune hunters on their way to the goldfields. [Read more…] about Stewart Peters: Unqualified practitioner of medicine, dentistry and pharmacy.

Right eating: Dr Muriel Bell

4 March 2019 1 Comment

Barbara Brookes

The bag of nuts I have in front of me has a Health Star Rating of 5. The back of the packet tells me the nuts contain vitamins B1 and E, are a source of monosaturated fats and a source of fibre. With this good news I am invited to enjoy ‘happy snacking’. But I’m sure that ‘snacking’ in itself is not good for me. Snacks in between meals can only add to my overall calorie intake and hence increase my weight. I might join the stream of overweight New Zealanders (if I’m not already swimming in it) threatening to overwhelm our health services.

Dr Muriel Bell spent her life dedicated to thinking about nutrition and its effects on New Zealanders’ health. Diana Brown’s recently published valuable biography of this pioneering medical researcher, The Unconventional Career of Dr Muriel Bell, charts Bell’s life from her childhood, when vitamins were a little-known entity, to her death in 1974, by which time she had played a major role in nutrition research and education in New Zealand.

“A cataclysmic emergency”: the influenza epidemic in Dunedin

17 December 2018 3 Comments

Sue Wootton

In March 1917, a school leaver called Frances McAllister travelled from her North Island home to the southern city of Dunedin. She was one of seven or eight females among thirty new entrants at the Otago Medical School. (The 1917 intake was much smaller than usual due to military conscription.) McAllister graduated as a doctor in 1922. Her memoir (published under her married name Frances Preston), Lady Doctor, Vintage Model, is a fascinating window into New Zealand life in the first half of the twentieth century. As the blurb puts it:

The early days of New Zealand medicine were not for the squeamish. Tuberculosis, hydatids, osteomyelitis and syphilis were common, bush-felling and saw-milling accidents abounded, and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic cut a swath through the country.”

Unlonely centenarians: the secret power of Super Agers

10 December 2018 6 Comments

Sharon Leitch

Not many people make their 100^th birthday. It’s a big deal, and rightly so: the family celebration and obligatory photos, the card from HRH (not so far off the Big Day herself), perhaps a write-up in the local paper. “Tell us!” the journalist asks, “what is the secret of your longevity?” We collectively lean forward to catch their snippets of wisdom. What is their secret? A Philosopher’s Stone? The Elixir of Life? After all, living for a Very Long Time is as close to immortality as we can achieve in the here-and-now.

The power of the primary source

10 December 2018 Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

In 1976, Professor Cyril Dixon, Head of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at the University of Otago, handed me a Preventive Medicine Dissertation written in 1942 by a 5th year medical student. I was a twenty-one-year-old history honours student working on a dissertation on abortion in the 1930s. Donald McAllister’s dissertation provided a source I never imagined existed: an interview with a ‘backstreet’ abortionist. Here I learned of the desperation of the mainly married women who had abortions performed in the back of the abortionist’s car. He knew his anatomy and about sterilising his implements (a No. 8 gum elastic catheter, slightly modified) and how to protect his identity (by performing his services in the dark). I tracked down Dr McAllister who was happy to speak to me and I learned even more. I was fascinated by his insights into the murky, undercover world of backstreet abortion.

Almost a year…

3 December 2018 1 Comment

Carolyn McCurdie

Mr and Mrs McCurdie — Carolyn McCurdie’s parents on their wedding day, 1940.

Mum was 91 when she died in June 2011. She’d been relatively well, but a fall put her in hospital, where she contracted pneumonia. She’d never completely recovered from the shock of Dad’s death, sixteen years earlier. That her life continued in his absence seemed to her to be perverse. So when it became clear that these were her final days, she looked forward to reunion. For her, there were no doubts. Her concern was then to tell each of us who gathered that she loved us, to talk to us about our wellbeing in the days to come. There was calm, generosity, grace. If a death can be beautiful, this one was.

So my grief was more for myself than for her. She did not want longer life. But there is no preparation for the loss of a loving mother. And it was more than that. Until then, I hadn’t realised that my view of my parents was still my child’s view of the single unit, Mum-and-Dad. As long as Mum was here, then so was Dad in some strange way. Then they were both gone. Completely.

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