Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

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.

On yer bike!

28 August 2017 Leave a Comment

Jillian Sullivan

It’s a fine line – to exercise or not. Outside, the sun lowering, the bank of clouds dulling the light, the day almost over. Yet inside, where I’m working at the computer, such lethargy … I can hardly bear to think of moving. Just take the mountain bike and ride twenty minutes up the rail trail and back again, I tell myself. I coax myself the same way when I’m writing – just write for ten minutes – and then put down the pen to find forty minutes have passed. I remind myself it’s always thinking about it that’s the hardest.

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Hospice: a philosophy of care

28 August 2017 5 Comments

Doug Lilly

Three years ago my partner asked me to deliver a gift to Carolyn, a friend of hers who was a patient at the Otago Community Hospice. Although I lived only a couple of streets away, I had never entered the building or given it much thought. I assumed it was a very sad place full of people dying of cancer.

Little did I know that within a few months I would be working at the Hospice as Operations Manager. My superficial and narrow understanding of what they did was quickly corrected as I discovered what a wonderful service it is, and how special is the team of staff and volunteers who work there and provide specialist palliative care.

Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early intervention and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psycho-social and spiritual.” (WHO definition 2002)

‘Family History’: poems by Johanna Emeney

21 August 2017 Leave a Comment

Johanna Emeney

It’s poetry week in New Zealand, in the run-up to National Poetry Day on Friday 25 August. Here Auckland poet Johanna Emeney talks about the writing of her second poetry collection, Family History, which contains poetry written in response to her mother’s illness. Many of Emeney’s poems in this collection document the behaviour and language of healthcare professionals, and the impact of that on the quality of care received.

Family History grew from the creative component of my PhD. My thesis was essentially a study of autobiographical medical poetry written from the points of view of doctors, patients, carers and parents.

I knew that I wanted to explore constructs of identity and family in my own collection – how they are affected by illness and medical treatment. I also knew that I wanted to write about how it felt to be close to someone who was not being well cared for by medical professionals, and conversely, how it felt when a person in a healthcare role acted compassionately. In particular, I wanted to highlight how important the job of anyone in healthcare is, whether that person is a physician, hospital nurse, district nurse or liaison officer. Their warmth or coolness, their dedication or dispassion, makes a huge difference to the experience of the patient and his or her family.