Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

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.

The last ambulance

12 November 2018 Leave a Comment

Lauren Rimmer and Jane Rimmer

The last surviving Rover Sunbeam ambulance from World War One is living out a long retirement about as far from the Western Front as it’s possible to get. Owned by Jason Rhodes, it is housed in his National Transport and Toy Museum in Wanaka, New Zealand.

In France, ‘Gutless Gert’ (as she was known), was used to transport wounded New Zealand soldiers. She was shipped to New Zealand in 1919, and after some time as a working ambulance based in Greymouth was sold to private owners. In 1966 Gert was found in a near-derelict condition in Northland, with a tamarillo tree growing through her bonnet.

Now faithfully restored and still in (careful) running order, Gutless Gert gets back on the road for special occasions. She was a special guest at the 2018 centenary Armistace Day commemorations held at Hawea (near Wanaka).

Lauren Rimmer and Jane Rimmer live in Hawea, New Zealand.

Thanks to World War One Ambulance website for additional information.

Mother’s milk

12 November 2018 Leave a Comment

Elaine Webster

When my baby was born I was astonished that nothing in the world had told me that birth is a miracle. Out of my body came this entirely new being: it seemed incredible, yet more real than anything, and entirely personal. And then I couldn’t believe how hard it was to take a baby into town, how so little in the culture supported mothering, how devalued its status. I could not reconcile my experience with the fact that all the billions of people who walk or ever walked the earth are only alive through the same miracle of the mother’s body, her fecundity and succour and work. I thought about the magnificence, vulnerability and ferocity of mothers, of how bodily and messy it all is. How it’s a result of sex but not very sexy. I thought about the hunger for the breast, about yearning and weaning, about how we all drink milk.

[Read more…] about Mother’s milk

“All went lame; all blind”

12 November 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Regeneration by Pat Barker was first published in 1991. It is the first of three novels (known collectively as The Regeneration Trilogy) set during and after the First World War, and explores the experiences of British officers suffering from ‘shell shock’ who received treatment at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh.

Regeneration centres on the radically new treatment provided at the time by the real-life psychiatrist and neurologist W. H. R. Rivers, whose approach was based on his research into nerve regeneration. Craiglockhart patients included the poets Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon, who also feature in Barker’s novel.

Regeneration is a terrific, absorbing read. In lucid, measured prose, Barker brings alive both the suffering of the soldiers and the specific challenges faced by hospital staff. She vividly conveys contemporary attitudes to war and patriotism, and medical theories about shell shock and its treatment. She also brings alive the setting of Craiglockhart, where, in real life, Wilfred Owen began to compose his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” in 1917. The title is from a line by the Roman poet Horace. Owen uses the whole quote to conclude his poem. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: ‘it is sweet and honourable to die for your country’.

This poem always bears rereading. It never loses its power to remind us that the choice to wage war has a terrible price. On the centenary anniversary of Armistace Day, a hundred years since the guns at long, long last fell silent on the Western Front, we can perhaps best honour those thousands who suffered by reflecting on Owen’s call to question the ‘high zest’ of adversarial political and patriotic rhetoric. This is a poem for peace. [Read more…] about “All went lame; all blind”