Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Health-chatter matters

17 July 2017 Leave a Comment

John Hale

We talk, socially, about health for the sake of our social health.

I learnt the following ditty at my father’s knee. He had learnt it in some school recitation-fest long ago. Imagine two Londoners, gents in bowler hats, who meet on a City street. They are imaginatively named Smith and Jones.

Says Jones: Good morning, Smith.

Smith replies: Good morning, Jones.

Jones: How oft we meet upon these stones.

Smith: You’re looking well.

Jones: And so are you!

Smith: You don’t say so?

Jones: I do, I do.

Smith: Well, how’s your mother?

Jones: Pray don’t quiz. I fear she has the rheumatiz.

Smith; That’s very queer—she had the same complaint last year.

Jones: Well, I must go.

Smith: And so must I.

Jones: Goodbye Smith.

Smith: Oh Jones, goodbye.

The mythic America’s Cup

10 July 2017 1 Comment

Annette Rose

We can’t outspend them, so we’ll have to out-think them” – Emirates Team New Zealand boss, Grant Dalton

Were he still alive the great mythologist Joseph Campbell would have been proud to see New Zealand, our small country at the bottom of the world, win the America’s Cup in yachting against all odds. This most epic of sea battles whose origin dates back to 1851 bears all the hallmarks of the Hero’s Journey myth, Campbell’s subject of interest.

The intimate complexities of sufferers

10 July 2017 1 Comment

Heather Bauchop

Writer Andrew Solomon explores depression in Noon Day Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Recounting his own experience, he weaves a personal and cultural analysis of the illness. His is a sophisticated and deeply human discussion of our vulnerabilities. Solomon rejects distance, embracing personal stories and the wonderful intimate complexities of sufferers and their lives. Solomon also looks at how factors such as poverty and culture enter into diagnoses, something that has been largely unrecognised, even by sufferers themselves. Poverty, too, is a dark place.

Solomon’s insight is profound and has the power of an inside view. When Eric Wilson talks about the need for unease, he is doing so from a position of privilege, one that does not recognise that, for many people, what he could call melancholia or depression (depending on the person), leads to deprivation and loss – not to an ability to challenge injustice. Sometimes it is only treatment enables a sufferer to survive. When Peter Kramer talks about depression it is from a comfortable clinician’s point of view. Solomon, however, brings his light touch and careful nuance to the language and experiences of depression. [Read more…] about The intimate complexities of sufferers

‘Alzheimer’s and a Spoon’: the nourishment of memory

10 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

How can we use language to talk about not having language?”

This question held poet Liz Breslin in its grip for the several years it took to write the poems that appear in her first – terrific – collection. The book’s title, Alzheimer’s and a Spoon, encompasses the themes woven through the poems. On the one hand there is a beloved grandmother’s illness, and her gradual loss of memory and language through Alzheimer’s disease. On (or in) the other hand, there is a spoon, and all the nourishment implied by spoons and spooning: physical, emotional and spiritual.

Breslin’s collection probes the bonds between memory, language and identity. It explores a resonating question: What happens to the present and the future if we forget the past?

Medicine and poetry: the how, the why, and things of wonder

3 July 2017 2 Comments

Christina Grove

So we have come to the end of the first University Semester for 2017. For a third year medical student this means a welcome break from lectures, tests and cold flats. But this semester wasn’t only filled with facts to be learned and diseases to be understood.

In the first semester each third year med student chooses a Humanities selective. For six weeks we put down Robins Basic Pathology and pick up philosophy, the Book of Job or, in my case, a selection of poetry. The Poetry selective was taken by Dr Tom McLean from the Department of English and Linguistics, who helped us to analyse various forms of poetry, starting with sonnets and ending in a visit from “real life poet” Lynley Edmeades.

An obsession with happiness?

3 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Heather Bauchop

There is wide debate about the cultural role of melancholia. American academic Eric Wilson writes of the dangers of bland candy-coloured happiness brought about, he says by swallowing pills. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008) Wilson asks what we are to make of the American ‘obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, for the innocuous smile? What fosters this desperate contentment?’

What would be the effect of ‘annihilating melancholia’ – that ‘major cultural force, a serious inspiration to invention, the muse behind much art and poetry’?