Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Discovering kawakawa

11 September 2017 Leave a Comment

Lorraine Ritchie

variations poem — Image by Janet de Wagt, from ‘Listening with my heart: poems by Aotearoa New Zealand nurses‘.

Sometimes when we are introduced for the first time to something we are not familiar with – an author, a singer, a type of food, a breed of dog – it suddenly starts appearing everywhere. The ubiquitous kawakawa plant was not so ubiquitous to me. I had not really noticed the lush green heart-shaped leaves nor recognised the plant by name until I received a pencil drawing of a kawakawa plant entwined with an intravenous fluid delivery system, drawn by artist Janet de Wagt to illustrate a poem in the book of poetry by New Zealand nurses that I was editing. This beautiful drawing, a delicate and powerful meeting of Western and Māori medicine, piqued my interest and I wanted to know more.

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Navigating the entangled and “infuriatingly intricate” world

11 September 2017 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Consider the term ‘medical science’. Easy. For most of us it conjures laboratories, test-tubes, scientists in white coats, evidence-based research, miracle medical breakthroughs. Medical science trips off the tongue so naturally – it’s surely one word, not two. The bond between ‘medical’ and ‘science’ is super-glued. It’s solid and unbreakable. We’ve closed the gap between these words, left no cracks to fall through. Medical science: a term to lean on, a term to trust.

Now consider the term ‘medical humanities’. Not so easy. Or so I surmise from the confused look on people’s faces when I tell them that the medical humanities are my field of research. It’s as if the words ‘medical’ and ‘humanities’ are unrelated strangers who need to be coaxed from separate, distant rooms and forced together for an awkward conversation where neither can quite understand the other’s language or point of view. What on earth would they talk about? What would be the point? What’s the use of the medical humanities? Where’s the miracle medical breakthrough in that research?

First born: June 1959. Radcliffe, Manchester.

4 September 2017 2 Comments

Wendy Fearnley

My labour started at 8am but we waited eleven hours before going to the large Edwardian house that had been converted to a maternity hospital. Brian, my husband, dropped me off and I was taken to a room with four beds, three of which were already occupied. I was instructed to get undressed and into bed. Nobody in the room spoke and then I realised that the woman next to me was not sleeping but sobbing quietly. She pulled the covers over her head.

The woman opposite mouthed, ‘Her baby was stillborn.’

Cultural nominal aphasia: how we’re losing the words for our world

4 September 2017 3 Comments

Heather Bauchop

Heather is a plant name: a scrubby evergreen shrub. In New Zealand, a weed; in Scotland, where I come from, a symbol of identity. So it is with curiosity that I read in Robert Macfarlane’s 2015 book, Landmarks, that heather is a noun you will no longer find in the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Heather, along with other nature words including acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, kingfisher, newt, otter, pasture and willow, have been removed from the dictionary as they no longer reflect the “consensus experience of modern-day childhood” – an urban, technologically-literate childhood – a childhood that needs only words such as attachment, broadband, celebrity, cut-and-paste and MP3 player.

“Start at once a bedside library”: narrative competence and medicine

4 September 2017 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Canadian physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919), sometimes called ‘the father of modern medicine’, urged doctors to maintain a lifetime habit of reading. In an address delivered at the opening of the Boston Medical Library in 1901, he said:

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.”

But, important though it was to keep up-to-date with the latest scientific findings, he did not want clinicians to limit themselves to reading medical texts. Osler advocated also reading broadly and deeply in the humanities and literature. He believed that “for physicians to be properly educated to practice their art, knowledge of the science of medicine … must be supplemented by familiarity with the humanities.”

Futuristic vision: robot surgeons

28 August 2017 3 Comments

Annabelle Payne

Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” – Steve Jobs

I am in my final year of high school and studying photography. This year, I am exploring the growing use of technology, especially in the ever-evolving world of surgery. I want to explore technological developments in the medical world, where robots have begun to take over the tasks of humans. Advanced surgical robots have already begun helping doctors, and there is a high chance that, at least for simple, repetitive procedures, robots will soon be able to perform the whole procedure.

In my work, I have used a hooded character to represent technology. The hooded, faceless ‘hacker’ plans to take over the surgical field with their new technology, and slowly make human surgeons obsolete. This character is found lurking in the back of the surgical theatre while a human surgeon is performing. The distance between them slowly decreases, until the ‘hacker’ and their technology has taken over the tasks of the surgeon.