Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Are we there yet? On the exercise of patience

7 September 2020 4 Comments

Sue Wootton

Patience (n.): the calm endurance of pain of any provocation; perseverance; forbearance; quiet and self-possessed waiting for something.”

Year of the houseplant: this variegated minima recently sold for NZ$8,150. (Photo: Trade me/ hurley88)

Okay, that’s nice, but are we there yet?

Patience is a virtue, so the saying goes, but I disagree. Yes, it’s possible to have the patience of a saint, but it’s also possible to have the patience of the devil. Many crimes and abuses have been committed by people patient enough to wait, preparing all the while to strike. Aggressors against others are often very, very patient. For the victims of those aggressive or oppressive acts there is more wisdom than virtue in ensuring your survival by keeping your head below the parapet and biding your time. Patience is a strategy, a behaviour, a matter of judgement, of choice-in-circumstance. Just as courage is called out only in the existence of fear, patience comes into existence in the presence of, and in response to, impatience. It requires the exercise of personal restraint and impulse control in the service of a greater end goal, and it may feel entirely counter-intuitive in the moment. I hesitate to disagree with my trusty Collins Dictionary, but it may not feel anything like “calm endurance” or “quiet and self-possessed waiting.” Yes, the patient person waits, but it’s an active state involving paying attention, reflecting, planning. Patience isn’t a thing. It’s a capacity, an attitude. It’s an ongoing recallibration of approach rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s a work in progress, a practice, an art.

Yes, yes, so you say, but are we there yet?

Prosthetic progress

7 September 2020 3 Comments

Henry Fry

Unidentified WWI soldier with a prosthetic right hand learning to write with his left. Photographs, Collection, Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand.

Adjusting to life after war has always been difficult. For amputees, artificial limbs are an essential requirement for attempting to get back a semblance of normality. In 1948, just three years after the Second World War, two University of Otago fifth year medical students, P. J. Dowsett and J. H. Heslop, did their public health dissertation about wartime amputees and aspects of artificial limbs.

Not surprisingly, they found that after the First and the Second World War, the need for prosthetics spiked. Before the Great War, there was little development or focus on artificial limbs. For centuries, the wooden leg was the most common example of what was possible. At the tail end of the First World War, the return of veteran amputees led to a great demand for prosthetic limbs. An estimated 41,000 returning British soldiers required prosthetics. The high demand prompted the introduction of more standardisation in the manufacturing process. During the interwar period, the metal artificial limb started to take over from the traditional wooden leg for the first time. By the Second World War, advances meant that prosthetics had become far more intricate than their basic predecessors.

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“Meninjitters”: The Bay of Islands Epidemic of 1941

20 July 2020 Leave a Comment

Lachy Paterson

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has been described, perhaps accurately, as a one-in-one-hundred-years event, but during its history New Zealand has a number of “scares” and lockdowns because of infectious diseases that have had detrimental impacts on Māori. In 2020, the memory of these epidemics has led some Māori communities to attempt to keep the coronavirus away from their own communities.

Historically, Pākehā were more concerned that Māori would spread disease to them. Māori were sometimes seen by Pākehā as a weak link in New Zealand’s chain of health defences, with poor, overcrowded and unsanitary housing and customs that could potentially spread disease. Māori, often due to poverty or lack of access, were also less likely to seek medical treatment, and epidemics could hit their communities hard.

#vaginalmesh not #pelvicmesh: Let’s call it what it is nē?

20 July 2020 13 Comments

Iona Winter

Eight weeks post-op, a simple procedure to inject Botox into my pelvic floor and I was done with the pain. During a trip to town to see the GP (again), a 40-minute drive with a tennis ball under my nono, I’d felt a strong urge to scream. The pain was unbearable. After the GP I drove for another hour – my current idea of hell (the driving bit) because everything from my vagina down to my foot goes numb. I worked my shift at the library, and when I got home the bloody fire wouldn’t start. Let’s just say the fire copped an earful. Thankfully I live alone.

Pain (of any kind, I’m thinking laterally here), like anger, is a potent force. Invisible pain does not mean that it’s all in our heads. And while I realise it’s difficult for others who are unable to fix it, just stop with the silencing, please.

“This is not how I imagined medical school”

20 July 2020 2 Comments

Ollie McCullough

20 July 2023

This is not how I imagined medical school. I thought it was going to have more cardiac arrests, more trauma and more helicopters. Instead, my days as a trainee intern are spent writing up discharge summaries for consultants who I mostly never see. We’re meant to have our own patients – take a history, examine and diagnose. But the hospital is saturated with junior medical staff and deficient in patients. I guess it’s not a bad thing. Ever since we found a way to treat disease by providing treatment specific to a patient’s genetic code we haven’t seen anywhere near the amount of patients that we used to. Well, so the consultants say. But still, I sometimes wish something big would happen.

Boracic snuff, camphor bags and masks

8 June 2020 2 Comments

Pamela Wood

Red Cross volunteers during the Spanish flu epidemic, USA, 1918.

How do you protect yourself against a pandemic virus? The current debate about the efficacy of wearing face masks in public as protection against Covid-19 echoes the difference of opinion during the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic a century ago. And while we all now pay attention to handwashing and social distancing, in 1918 people followed government advice to breathe deeply in public inhalation chambers filled with a zinc sulphate mist or where a machine sprayed it directly into their mouth. Responsibility for their own health meant they also shared their own preventive measures for warding off influenza.

To mask or not to mask? According to the 1919 commission of inquiry which considered the best ways to deal with any future pandemic, there was complete agreement that doctors, nurses and other attendants in close contact with influenza patients should wear masks. This was probably prompted by the shock that in less than eight weeks, three quarters of hospital nurses had contracted the disease from pandemic patients. The question was whether citizens should wear masks in public.