Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

A car crash in Cambodia (Part 2)

3 December 2018 4 Comments

Marnie Walters

In 2012, New Zealander Marnie Walters was working in Cambodia managing communications for the Cambodian Children’s Trust. Returning to Battambang City after visiting isolated families in Prey Veng province, her vehicle was involved in a terrible accident. This is the second part of her story about what happened. It continues from Part One, which you can read here.

Glowing in the centre of the scene, the two crushed cars illuminated each other with their headlights, but the surrounding countryside was vast and dark. There were no flashing lights of salvation, no emergency services to call. I examined my phone again and could now make some sense of it. I must have made over fifty calls sitting there, first to New Zealand, then to nearby Battambang, but it was late and for so, so long, nobody answered. When one of our social workers finally picked up, my tongue turned heavy and clumsy in my mouth.

“Bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-” I burbled. “Bub-bub-bub.”

As hard as I tried, I could not convert thoughts into recognisable sounds. I had to hang up. Eventually, I managed to send a text to my friend Erin, a message that I would take back if I could. We had a horrible car crash. People are dead. Please call me. After reading that text, Erin rushed to find help and nearly came off her motorbike in panic.

A car crash in Cambodia (Part 1)

26 November 2018 6 Comments

Marnie Walters

We’d been driving through the Cambodian countryside for seven or eight hours and I’d become restless from sitting so long. Wriggling around to get comfortable, I slipped the shoulder strap of my seatbelt over my head and stretched out as well as I could. The Hilux was brimming with road-trip supplies: backpacks, camera and laptop bags, water, tropical fruit, even a whole roast duck. Next to me in the back seat, a young mother held her new baby girl, shifting her from arm to arm. She did not speak English and I had long exhausted my limited Khmer, but I smiled over at her and considered offering to hold the baby. If the mother’s arms ached she hadn’t noticed, there was nobody else in her world as she gazed lovingly down at that tiny sleeping face. I didn’t interrupt them.

Trivial pursuits?

26 November 2018 14 Comments

Sue Wootton

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889-1951

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Secondary school students in New Zealand have recently finished sitting their end of year external examinations. One of those papers was a Level 3 History exam, in which final year students were asked to respond to this quote from Julius Caesar: “Events of importance are the result of trivial causes”.

After the exam, 1300 students signed a petition asking that markers not downgrade their answers if they hadn’t understood the meaning of the word ‘trivial’. The gist of their argument was that ‘trivial’ is not a word that seventeen and eighteen-year-old English speakers in 2018 can be expected to know, and therefore, for fairness, a definition should have been included in the exam paper.

[Read more…] about Trivial pursuits?

Dr Margaret Cruickshank: “faithful unto death”

26 November 2018 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

In 1897, Margaret Cruickshank became the second woman graduate of the Otago Medical School in New Zealand. (The first was Emily Siedeberg, who had graduated the year previously.) Dr Cruickshank registered as a General Practitioner, and was the first woman GP in New Zealand, practising from 1897-1918 in the small South Canterbury town of Waimate.

When the influenza pandemic broke out in November 1918 Dr Cruickshank worked day and night treating patients who had fallen ill. Late in the month, she herself caught the disease and died of pneumonia, a complication of influenza, on 28 November.

Ongoing trauma

19 November 2018 4 Comments

Barbara Brookes

postcard of NZ amputees — Postcard with photograph of New Zealand soldier amputees, about 1914–18

The 1917 War Pensions Amendment Act contained a chilling ‘Third Schedule’ outlining the payment ratio to a full war pension paid for certain kinds of disablement. Loss of two limbs, of both hands, or ‘very serious facial disfigurement‘, for example, qualified for the total pension. Amputation of the right arm at the shoulder joint led to an 85% entitlement while such an amputation of the left arm led to 80% entitlement. A differential entitlement for right and left hand continued throughout the schedule but men who had been certified as left-handed were entitled to the higher amount. Total deafness led to a 70% entitlement while loss of one eye was costed at a 50% entitlement. ‘Lunacy’ qualified for a 100% entitlement, if it could be proven. The Inspector General of Hospitals, Frank Hay, declared in 1919 that ‘a man of sound mind, fighting honestly for a cause, will face dangers and undergo great deprivations without losing his mental balance … It is different with those predisposed to mental disorder.’ Often, he suggested, in line with contemporary hereditarian thinking about mental illness, the latter were ‘feeble-minded persons’.

The First World War did much to break such hereditarian beliefs. The new kind of deskilled warfare – where men just had to wait in trenches before following the order to go ‘over the top’ often to their death – led to many breaking down with a new disorder, popularly known as ‘shell shock’. This manifested itself in numerous ways: various forms of paralysis, amnesia, inability to speak, tics, insomnia and horrific nightmares. Medical authorities at first feared malingering but the sheer numbers of men breaking down led to new treatments in the later years of the war. As early as May 1916, an Auckland osteopath was advertising his services for ‘shell shock’ and suggested he would treat ‘a limited number of returned servicemen’ free of charge. [Read more…] about Ongoing trauma

“Poetry and Mindfulness”

19 November 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Whatever the advantages of the internet and the many technologies we use to leverage it, there is growing evidence that we are paying a price in distraction and in neurological changes that are affecting our ability to concentrate, to follow lengthy arguments – and perhaps even to empathize with each other.” – Bryan Walpert, Poetry and Mindfulness.

We citizens of the so-called developed world are living through a rapidly changing, fast-paced and information-dense time. We can trace the effects of this in our daily language. In a relatively short length of time, the digital age has appropriated certain key words, turning once qualitative terms into quantitative ones, and stretching the former meaning of words like ‘connection’ and ‘friend’ almost to breaking point. (I think also of terms once the province of human anatomy and communication, like ‘digital’, ‘fingerprint’, ‘face recognition’ and ‘voice technology’; and the emotional words ‘like’ and ‘love’.) Ostensibly we are the most connected and informed generations ever, yet loneliness, stress, cynicism, anxiety and depression seem endemic.