Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

The long swim: a response to miscarriage

4 March 2019 2 Comments

Kirstie McKinnon

Miscarriage can be a difficult experience. It feels delicate for me still, although it has been several years since my last miscarriage. There is a silence that accompanies this kind of loss, a lack of conversation, a lack of acknowledgement, a problem of knowing how to say how it is, and to whom. Dolphins and whales tell their grief through action and their way of speaking has provided me – after a long time – with a way to find some human language to express my own ‘long swim’.
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Stewart Peters: Unqualified practitioner of medicine, dentistry and pharmacy.

4 March 2019 8 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.

Putting our feet up for a while …

17 December 2018 6 Comments

Sue Wootton

Corpus has had another great year, publishing 127 posts on a wide variety of health-related topics by a wide variety of writers. Recently we also passed 100,000 reads of articles on the site since we launched Corpus in May 2016. The total number of articles we’ve published so far is over 350.

put your feet up Corpus is now taking a lengthy break over summer. Posts on the site will resume on an intermittent basis from March 2019. Due to other commitments and a lack of funding, we will be unable to keep up the pace of publishing three articles a week.

The website will stay online indefinitely so you can dip back into articles you enjoyed or haven’t read yet. Just use the search and category boxes to find something of interest.

Many thanks again to all those who have contributed such thoughtful pieces over the past three years. We can’t sign off without a special thank you to our unsung hero Doug Lilly who has managed the design and technical side of the site since its inception (even though it made him intolerably grumpy at times as he fought off the spammers and hackers).

Here’s a small selection of 2018’s most popular posts to dip back into:

“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.