conversations about medicine and life
We publish a range of perspectives on health and wellbeing, especially reflective work which fleshes out the biomedical version of illness and disability.
Elizabeth Brooke-Carr
How many New Zealanders are receiving chemotherapy this week for cancer and other conditions? The number must be in the thousands. Yet this common medical intervention can never be a commonplace experience, evoking as it does such wildly fluctuating levels of both hope and anxiety.
Poet Elizabeth Brooke-Carr writes of receiving her first round: [Read more…] about “All hitched up”: a chemotherapy story
Grace Carlyle
In autumn I began cutting back the Japanese anemones as they finished blooming. Then I became ill again and the last few still in flower were left to look after themselves. The flowers fell, the tips of the canes where they had been turning to white cotton. This held a novelty for a while, but then they began to look shabby.
I felt the same way, heading into winter barely able to walk from one room to another. Shabbiness in the garden was not a high priority. Keeping myself clean and fed was.
Sue Wootton
Fiction might be ‘all made up’, but a great novel illuminates reality like nothing else. How? For Milan Kundera, literature is essential to humanity’s body of knowledge precisely because it does not represent scientific thinking. Fiction’s power is in its resistance to reductionist thought and its willingness to engage with life’s complexity. Novelists weave and layer a multitude of observations about the lived human condition. The truer and more attentive these observations, the more complex the fiction, and the less certain its conclusions. Indeed, according to Kundera, the novel’s wisdom is “the wisdom of uncertainty”.
This doesn’t sound like much to lean on. Yet it turns out that in times of trouble being able to access the wisdom of uncertainty is an invaluable resource.
Barbara Brookes
In New Zealand, the first weekend in June is Queen’s Birthday Weekend. Corpus is taking a short break today for the public holiday. We hope you are able to enjoy some time off too, perhaps shoring up on some precious, fortifying pre-solstice fresh air and sunshine to carry you through the next few months of winter.
92 years ago, in London, a ‘certain line of treatment’ ushered in the birth of a baby girl. Barbara Brookes explains:
At 2:40 am on 21st April 1926, the then Duchess of York gave birth to a daughter in her parents’ London residence at No. 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair. The popular 25 year old duchess had originally planned to give birth in convenient rented accommodation but her uncle, King Edward VIII, ‘strongly disapproved’ of the idea that a child ‘which might ascend the throne’ should be born in a ‘hired house’.
Louisa Baillie
The W. D. Trotter Anatomy Museum at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, contains a collection that is truly a confluence of science and the humanities. The museum houses over 3,000 catalogued anatomy specimens and models in an elegant space whose warm aesthetics include diffuse natural lighting, wooden framed glass cabinets and rimu stairs leading to a mezzanine floor.
The models themselves are works of art as well as teachers of science. They include wax models by the Ziegler and Tramond studios, 77 authentic painted plaster models by the Leipzig firm of Steger, clastique papier-mache´models by Louis Auzoux’s factory, as well as many in-house wet and plastinated specimens, and models made of fibreglass, wax and even hand-carved wood.
[Read more…] about Taonga for learning: the Otago Medical School Anatomy Museum
Laurence Fearnley
My father intended to retire in September, when he would be turning sixty-two. On the fourth of July he came home from work in agony and went into hospital. He was told he had stomach cancer and he died on July the 23rd.
My father was a doctor and very tidy, without being fanatical. When he came home from the surgery, he always tucked his case in a dark space beside the foot of the stairs. He placed it carefully, so that it stood upright and was always parallel with the bottom banister. I doubt he ever took much notice of this, he just did it automatically. On the day he came home sick, he dropped his bag in the hall and ran up to his bed.
