Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

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.

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“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”

Remembering Black November 1918

5 November 2018 Leave a Comment

Geoffrey Rice

One hundred years ago this month New Zealand suffered its worst peacetime disaster and its greatest public health crisis. It had taken four years of the First World War to kill 18,000 New Zealand soldiers, but in the space of only two months an estimated 9,000 New Zealanders, mostly civilians, died from the pneumonic complications of pandemic influenza. Pakeha (Europeans) died at the rate of 5.8 per 1000, but the indigenous Maori population died at almost eight times that rate, or 49 per 1000. Doctors at the time estimated that about half the population caught the flu, and most recovered, but some small towns suffered almost 90 per cent morbidity and when there were too few able-bodied adults to organise care for the sick, high death rates resulted.

Influenza 1918: the Samoan experience

5 November 2018 Leave a Comment

John Ryan McLane

A blunder which amounts to a crime.”

In 1918 the Samoan archipelago was split between American Samoa (a United States territory) and Western Samoa (previously a German colony but under New Zealand governance from 1914). The 1918 influenza pandemic killed a quarter of Western Samoans, while leaving American Samoa unscathed. Why were their experiences so different?

In late 1918 a second wave within a single pandemic of influenza was spreading throughout Asia and the Pacific. On 30 October 1918 the Union Steamship Company’s Talune left Auckland for its run through Polynesia. The new, more lethal influenza variant had arrived in Auckland with the spring, and several crew members were ill. On 7 November the Talune reached Apia, the main port of New Zealand-occupied Western Samoa.

“With Them Through Hell”

5 November 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

11 November 2018 will mark one hundred years since the official end of the First World War. Over 18,000 New Zealand combatants were killed in the conflict, and many more were wounded or fell ill. Their experiences were so harrowing that most survivors, even years after returning to civilian life, would never speak of what they had endured during the ‘war to end all wars’.

Serving alongside them in that hellish world were the men and women of the New Zealand medical corps. A century on, Anna Roger has written a comprehensive history of this ‘other army’, which was charged, not with ending lives, but with saving them. The result is a rich tribute to the courage and compassion of those who worked “in appalling, perilous conditions and for inhumanely long hours” to alleviate the suffering of others.

First general anaesthetic – the hero’s journey

29 October 2018 Leave a Comment

Chris Todd

It’s my first general anaesthetic. I’m due to go under in 45 minutes. I’m at the threshold of the hero’s journey into the abyss. In this instance, the eight steps of the hero’s journey go like this:

Step 1. Disrobe and Body Paint.

The surgeon comes in and we shake hands. I pull down my pants, exaggerated ‘low-rider’ style, and hitch up my T-shirt to my chest. He has a green marker pen which he uses to draw arrows and lines to indicate my groin hernias, then three shorter lines where he intends to puncture my abdomen. The first of these goes just under my naval (for the camera), the second directly below that to inflate my abdomen with gas so he can see where he’s going (like using a torch under the blankets), and the third (to insert tools through) below the second.

“See you soon.”