Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Atlas – a literary medical journal

30 April 2018 2 Comments

Helen Ker

Atlas is a literary medical journal, published in print and sold in bookstores around New Zealand, that offers an alternative to the usual scientific discourse that surrounds our bodies. It hopes to shift medical conversations away from the rigid and prescriptive to a literary form that accommodates our human complexities.

I started Atlas in my third year of medical school because I was beginning to see that certain parts of the illness experience are missed through our predominantly scientific ways of theorising illness and treating people. I realised that this had the potential to undermine the quality of patient care because illness is far more than just a pathological process.

War injuries – they ripple on

23 April 2018 5 Comments

Sue Walthert

Physician, poet and soldier John McCrae (1872-1918)

The moving poem “In Flanders Fields” was written in 1915 by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae for the men he buried in Ypres, Belgium, during World War 1. Recently our Flagstaff Community Choir has been singing the lyrics. In the second verse, a drum takes up the beat and the words connect with me.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

My Grandfather Pops, an ANZAC soldier, marched in Flanders fields and in Gallipoli. He was decorated twice for bravery, imprisoned once for forgery and twice badly wounded. He returned home, his life muddied by war. He tried to wash that mud away – unfortunately, with alcohol. His life was one of suffering and sadness. That suffering is still felt through the generations.

Diagnosis: papyrophile.

23 April 2018 2 Comments

Dad was a papyrophile; he loved paper. Not necessarily what was written on it, but the feel of it, the size, length and shape of it. He viewed paper in its various forms in a way that most people don’t: as the end-point of a long, careful process of ruling, sizing, cutting, fitting into a desired product.

He began his working life as an apprentice ‘ruler’ for Coulls Somerville Wilkie in Dunedin, New Zealand (known in the trade as ‘Coulls’) at the age of 14 years old. His is not a unique story: with three brothers at the war and an invalided father, his mother accompanied him to his first and only ever interview and an apprentice he became, staying on with the same firm for forty-five years.

Homesickness

23 April 2018 5 Comments

Barbara Brookes

Who hasn’t suffered it? A longing for the quality of the light, the green of the country, the sound of the waves, the language of your origins, or for familiar food. Homesickness might strike at odd times and be triggered by the senses.

Watching Marina Willer’s Red Trees recently, a documentary about Willer’s Jewish refugee father who went to Brazil, I learned a new word, saudade, which her father said he felt for Europe. Saudade has no real English equivalent, though Wikipedia suggests ‘missingness’. In English we might think of nostalgia, a longing for past good times, but we do not have a day of official celebration of this emotion, as the Brazilians apparently do, on January 30^th.

[Read more…] about Homesickness

Polio and me

16 April 2018 1 Comment

Marlayna Zucchiatti

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” Adolf Hitler.

Here comes Polio

In 1957, I was 17 months old, our family’s fifth and youngest child. I was, my mother says, just “nicely learning to walk”. Then I got polio. It came to me at my uncle Bap’s remote cabin one weekend in Northern Ontario, Canada. Close to midnight and engulfed by an angry storm, my mother, my father, my polio and I were taken across the dark, choppy lake to the car, to the hospital, to the dreaded news. There was no doubt. Polio: 1.

The predicted blueprint of my life had taken a detour. And I had a new, annoying companion to travel with: from now on it was Polio and me.

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Monday night magic

16 April 2018 1 Comment

Susie Frame and Sue Mepham

Every Monday evening in a suburban Dunedin church we have the privilege of being part of a little bit of magic – Flagstaff Community Choir magic. FCC started in 2008 but prior to that we had been working together, teaching and leading music in various settings, both in schools and in the community. During this time, we observed the benefits of group singing. Not just a musical activity, group singing is a workout for the body and mind, promoting self-esteem, enhancing mood, and providing opportunities for friendship. [Read more…] about Monday night magic