Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Dr Emily Siedeberg-McKinnon’s account of the history of maternity care in Dunedin

9 October 2017 Leave a Comment

Dr Emily Siedeberg-McKinnon

No records appear to have survived of the pioneering work in training midwives carried out at St Helens Hospital in Dunedin. The St Helen’s Hospitals provided early women doctors with a secure base and regular salary which was sometimes hard to achieve in general practice. Dr Emily Siedeberg-McKinnon wrote the following account of its initial years, which were subject to controversy. The account was retrieved from a storage box at the Dunedin Pioneer Women’s Hall by historian-in-residence Rachael Fraser, and edited for publication on Corpus by Dr Barbara Brookes.

Liberal Premier, Richard John Seddon established the first State Maternity Hospital in Wellington in June 1905 and called it St. Helens Hospital after the town of his birthplace In England. The hospitals were to cater for working men whose wives earned less than £4 per week and were to provide training for state-registered midwives, under the 1904 Midwives Registration Act.

Blue devils

2 October 2017 1 Comment

Alannah Tompkins

Mental health problems among medical practitioners are a touchy subject. There has been research on anxiety, depression, and burnout in different occupations, and medicine has come in for its share of attention, but it is a difficult topic to address in the present given twenty-first century aspirations to seemingly infallible practice. It is reassuring, I hope, to learn that we can also study the phenomenon in the past and realise that infallibility or perfection is a myth in medical practice; current practitioners might take comfort from predecessors who were human first, and qualified doctors second.

[Read more…] about Blue devils

Out of the box: memoir of a trainee nurse, Dunedin Hospital 1884

2 October 2017 Leave a Comment

M. H. Fraser

Rachael Francis, Historian in Residence at the Pioneer Women’s Hall, Dunedin, and a box of treasure.

Dunedin’s Pioneer Women’s Hall, set up in 1942 in a former lawyer’s office in Moray Place, was the end result of a project initiated by Dr Emily Siedeberg, New Zealand’s first woman doctor. Envisaged as both a monument to the city’s foremothers and a centre for women’s activities, it remains in use by various community groups today. Recently, historian-in-residence Rachael Francis has been delving into the boxes of memorabilia stored in the hall. One of her finds is this memoir by M. H. Fraser, one of the first nurse trainees at Dunedin Hospital in 1884. Fifty years later, in 1934, Nurse Fraser wrote the following memoir about her experiences.

Nurse training [in 1884], by M. H. Fraser

Towards the end of 1884, the trustees of Dunedin Hospital realised that their nursing needs could no longer be met by stray trained nurses visiting the town and by untrained people. The men patients were nursed by untrained men, the women and children depended mostly on the visitors, some of whom had come in search of healthcare for themselves. In our home, a friend was being nursed after a major operation … and the nurse in charge was visited by a trained nurse, who was temporarily employed in the hospital. She brought news of the Trust’s decision [to train nurses] and turning to me said, “You are the type. Why not apply?”

This appealed to me at once and it was decided that I should write to the secretary, Mr Burns … A week later saw me in harness.

“This thing lies luminous”: on being concussed

2 October 2017 10 Comments

Iona Winter

Day One.

Misjudge a wall, knock myself out, and come to sitting on the floor. Tears. Shock. Pain. I can’t figure out what’s happened. Get up, apply icy fingers to the protrusion, and drive into town for work on automatic pilot. Surreal landscapes. It feels like a truck hit my head. I soldier on through the day, take paracetamol, go home, look up concussion on the internet and meet multiple criteria, then hope for a quiet weekend.

Understanding Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

25 September 2017 2 Comments

Dr Rosamund Vallings

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (known as ME/CFS) is a complex acquired condition. Sufferers experience a range of debilitating symptoms, including fatigue, and problems with pain, gut function, brain function, immune, cardiac and endocrine systems. Dr Rosamund Vallings has been treating and researching ME/CFS for over 25 years. Here she describes what drew her to this work, and where the research is heading.

I qualified in medicine from the London Hospital Medical College in 1961. This was followed by house surgeon appointments in Plymouth, Devon and the London Hospital. I then set off to New Zealand as a Ship’s Doctor with Port Line, spending some time in NZ, before returning again as Ship’s Doctor to England to marry one of the officers. We settled in England for 2 years and during that time I worked in Family Planning developing an interest in Women’s Health. Then it was back to NZ with our first 2 babies.

We settled in NZ, had a third child, and I initially continued to work in Family Planning and built up a small General Practice focusing on female hormone disorders.

Writing down catastrophe

25 September 2017 4 Comments

Fiona Farrell

In June this year, six years since Christchurch was shaken awake into a new understanding of the city and the geology beneath it, I published a novel. Decline and Fall on Savage Street was prompted by that event, and the years that succeeded it as the city shimmied then settled to a kind of peace, or as close to peace as this country can manage. (There have been a couple of quakes already today; yesterday there were seven, though they have been tiny and distant, barely discernible. A reminder, however, that this is not perhaps the most tranquil place to perch, above the interface of a couple of major tectonic plates.)

Writing about this event and the political and corporate activity it unleashed has been a curious business.