conversations about medicine and life
We publish a range of perspectives on health and wellbeing, especially reflective or creative work which fleshes out the biomedical version of illness and disability.
Savannah Adams
Towards the end of May, after months of organising, I was part of a group of second and third year Otago University medical students who had the pleasure of bringing to life the 2017 Dunedin Teddy Bear Hospital. The hospital runs for a week and culminates with a Community Day on the final Saturday. It gives children, mostly aged 3 to 7, the chance to engage with a simulated healthcare environment, but in this case with the wonderful moral support of a best friend – their teddy.
John Hale
I write a weekly column, WordWays, in the Otago Daily Times newspaper, in which I look at language matters, very broadly conceived. Articles range from the history and grammar and wordstock of English, to its family of languages and beyond, to the purposes of speaking and writing in it, and the rights and wrongs of spelling, pronunciation, grammar, syntax, you name it. I return whenever possible to the best exemplars of our language, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens — the giants of English expression.
Recently someone described me as a “word-surgeon”. This prompted me to examine her metaphor. I dissect words, and study their anatomy. I work out how language ticks and sometimes I sound like a GP when asked for advice on usage. But, a word-surgeon?
Julia Wells
[British Central Africa] is a country where Europeans can live healthily by the careful practice of the rules of sanitation and hygiene.” – John Murray, Guide to Health in Africa (London: The African World, 1912).
Tropical medicine of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is remembered today primarily for its ground-breaking medical discoveries. The identification of the malaria parasite and its mosquito vector, the development of commercially synthesised and mass-produced prophylactic quinine, and advances in the treatment of sleeping sickness, for example, all helped to define tropical medicine as the epitome of modern medical science. [Read more…] about Dressing well for going troppo
Alyssa Kennedy and Barbara Brookes
Alyssa Kennedy, studying Medical History, has been examining the late nineteenth century casebooks of the Dunedin hospital held at Archives New Zealand (Dunedin Branch). She chose to examine uterine complaints. Her findings remind us of the different reproductive experience of women in the past.
Sue Wootton
Recently I talked at the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival as part of a panel of health practitioners who write. Called Word Balm, our session set out to explore what language contributes to the practice of medicine. At the end of a wide-ranging conversation, chair Barbara Brookes called for questions from the audience. A woman raised her hand.
This is all very well,” she said, “but how come my GP looks at the computer screen, not at me, throughout the consultation?”
Dr Tree Cocks
Doctors in Denial by Ron Jones is a meticulously researched and perceptive account of the “unfortunate experiment” entailing non-treatment of cervical carcinoma in situ that occasioned The Cartwright Inquiry. It is an account of two cancers really, one physical and the other moral.
Jones has gathered together an enormous amount of detailed information from the 1920s to the present day. Because his research has tapped many sources and because he is interested in human dynamics, the chronology sometimes takes a complex route. I found it a multifaceted detective story, to uncover the why and how of the tragedy.
[Read more…] about ‘Doctors in Denial’: an account of two cancers, one physical and the other moral’
