Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Out of the garden

11 June 2018 3 Comments

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.

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Reading recoveries

11 June 2018 1 Comment

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.

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The Queen’s birth day

4 June 2018 4 Comments

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’.

Taonga for learning: the Otago Medical School Anatomy Museum

28 May 2018 Leave a Comment

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.

My father’s case

28 May 2018 2 Comments

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 23^rd.

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.

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The recovery journey: “In My Room” by Jim Lucey

28 May 2018 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

There is no health without mental health.” – Jim Lucey (Irish Times interview, 2017)

Dr Jim Lucey is an Irish psychiatrist who has spent over three decades working in his chosen field of healthcare. In his 2014 book, In My Room: the Recovery Journey as Encountered by a Psychiatrist, Lucey outlines some of what he has learned during this time. He calls the book, which is framed as a collection of anonymised case studies, “an authentic description of the journey from distress to recovery as I have witnessed it”.

The room of the title is both the actual room of the clinic and the metaphorical ‘room’ of the mind. We all visit the former from time to time, but we must be able to live permanently in, or with, the latter. Lucey is compassionately interested in the various ways his patients learn to manage that challenge. He has much to share about the nature of recovery and of keeping well. [Read more…] about The recovery journey: “In My Room” by Jim Lucey