Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Heart risk 1; Sore puku 0

6 November 2017 5 Comments

Kyle Eggleton

I’m a doctor who has been writing poetry for about a year. My poetry writing was born out of a need to more deeply understand the world. Sometimes this need to understand the world arises from a frustration, like a dry seed head lodged in a tramping sock that rubs and chaffs and spoils an otherwise leisurely walk. Sometimes my need to understand stems from my lack of inner comprehension. By exploring the dusty and cobweb filled recesses of my inner self I often uncover a truth about myself and where I fit in the world.

The colours, smells, sounds and emotions invoked by poetry creates what my poet mother calls ‘word pictures’. My work as a general practitioner is full of these word pictures – like the silvery trails left on a father’s face as he talks of the suicide of his child; the cloying, pungent aroma of poverty; the dry hacking paroxysms wracking the frail body of a man without hope.

A Swift bike and book tour

6 November 2017 5 Comments

Joe Baker

Dunedin’s Lilliput Libraries are hand-crafted book-filled boxes set up on the fence line of a dedicated Lilliput Library guardian. Passers-by are encouraged to “take a book now, leave a book later”. John’s Lilliput Library needed a bit of a turn around; we needed some exercise. Thus the Swift bike and book tour was born. We decided that each tour member would take a book to John’s library and swap it with a book found therein. We would then cycle on to other Lilliput Libraries, exchanging our book whenever we found one we preferred. At any one time we would each carry only one book. We would then cycle back up to John’s with our single prized tome.

This place called old age

30 October 2017 3 Comments

Sue Wootton

Renée is one of New Zealand’s most admired playwrights and novelists, the author of eight novels and over twenty plays. She writes direct, clear-sighted social histories, threaded through with humour and with forthright tenderness. Her stories often follow strong, capable women carving good lives for themselves and their dependents in the face of hardship or injustice. I was privileged last week to be present at the Dunedin launch of her memoir, These Two Hands. In person, and on the page, Renée is witty, irreverent, intelligent, moving and utterly inspiring. I defy you to read her memoir and not want to claim your own life with words, passion and delight. These Two Hands is a tonic and a treasure, like its author. Here, from These Two Hands, is Renée on “being old”:

Being old. What’s it like? How does it feel? How do you do it? There are no maps, no guidelines, you have to make your own way. A lot depends on your idea of what being old means. I had no examples in my family because they nearly all died early, and Puti Mary, who lived to seventy-three, and Emmanuel, ninety-three, were before my time. Although they could only have told me how they managed, not how I should.

Six months in a grey gown: an epidemic of rheumatic fever

30 October 2017 4 Comments

Beatrice Hale

child with rheumatic fever — Erythema marginatum on the back of a child with acute rheumatic fever.

When I was nine-going-on-ten – nearly 70 years ago! – I was hospitalised for six months with rheumatic fever. There was an epidemic in Aberdeen, Scotland, at the time. And there were two long wards of children. Those of us with rheumatic fever had grey gowns, and those of us with something else had red gowns. I never discovered quite what all those something elses might be.

Two boys, one in red and one in grey, stand out in my memory. Tommy Nobbs had a red gown. He had the bed opposite mine, across the central passageway, so I always had a fairly good idea of what he was up to. He was probably seven or eight, and mischievous. He did not like being in hospital, nor did he like staying in bed most of the time. He was allowed to move around a bit, and was directed to the children’s room, with its toys and books, and sometimes to the ward kitchen. But these weren’t enough for our Tommy. He used to lie angelically in bed, waiting until the nurses were occupied in other areas. Then he’d squirm out of his bed and slide under other beds, poking the unhappy occupant. We couldn’t yell at him, because that would have brought the staff running, and result in DISCOVERY.

Elegant feet and gentle noses: anatomical drawing and personhood

30 October 2017 2 Comments

Monica Carroll and Adam Dickerson

A description of a collaboration between a writer (Monica Carroll) and a philosopher (Adam Dickerson).

Through Husserl’s phenomenology we explored the idea of forms of writing that could be coherent with lived experience and with an experience of the body. We found that specialised forms of description, such as anatomical description, shaped and portrayed some parts of lived experience while leaving others parts unspoken. Our explorations in this field produced an artists’ book of loose-leaf folios that point towards unspoken areas of the body, both animated and lifeless.

Work

23 October 2017 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

In New Zealand, every fourth Monday in October is Labour Day, a public holiday that commemorates the introduction of the eight-hour working day. This achievement dates back to the 1840 campaign of Wellington carpenter Samuel Pickering. The public holiday dates from 1890, and was ‘Mondayised’ in 1910.

Work is extremely important to health and wellbeing (read a Corpus take on this by Matt Blackwood here). It can enrich a life, or grind a person into dust. As ever, balance is all, and Corpus is taking a mini-break for Labour Day (just one post this week), because…

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Philip Larkin, from Toads [Read more…] about Work