Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

The Golden Age of Islamic Medicine

24 April 2017 2 Comments

Terence Doyle

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 the armies of Islam swept out of the Arabian Peninsula. Within fifty years they had overrun all the territory conquered by Alexander the Great nine hundred years before. Within one hundred years their empire extended from Spain to India and from Egypt to the Caspian Sea in the north. The Caliphs then set about consolidating their empire, building a new capital of Baghdad in 762. This was strategically located on the fertile plain of the river Tigris, away from the reach of marauding armies, yet on the lucrative trading route of the Silk Road to China. The centre piece of the new capital was The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), a combination of publishing house, library and research institute. This became the focus of a vigorous expansion of knowledge in all of the sciences including medicine.

Easter under the apple tree

17 April 2017 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

Corpus is taking a bit of an Easter break. We’ll be back next week with three fresh articles. Meanwhile…

Easter, here in the southern hemisphere, means autumn: harvest season. I’ve been working in the garden under an apple tree laden with fruit, chopping back an overgrowth of comfrey, fennel, flowering marjoram, nasturtiums, forget-me-nots and marigolds. I’ve been confusing the bee lines, sending spiders scurrying for cover, casually wrecking our garden’s hedgehog hibernation hideaways. It made me remember this poem:

[soliloquy id=”3227″]

And this one:

Hedgehog by Paul Muldoon

Sue Wootton is co-editor of Corpus.

The front fell off

17 April 2017 Leave a Comment

RIP John Clarke (1948-2017)

On being cursed

10 April 2017 4 Comments

Laurence Fearnley

My son was born in Würzburg, Germany, at nine seconds past midnight on the first of January, 2002. Two and a half months later we boarded an aeroplane at Frankfurt, one that would deliver us home. We had been living in Germany for four years and we were looking forward to seeing our families, and introducing them to our only child.

The journey, of course, was long and tiring. I nursed Harry, Alex changed him; we took turns walking up and down the aisle. Somewhere between Bangkok and Sydney Harry started crying and for an agonising half hour nothing we did would calm him. Then, suddenly, he fell asleep.

The aeroplane made a stop at Sydney before continuing on to Auckland. We filed into the transit gate-lounge and as I queued to go through the metal detector a passenger from our cabin approached me, placed her hand on Harry’s head and, speaking calmly, said, “Suffer and die.” I recoiled but, thinking I had misheard, asked her to repeat her comment. This time she looked at me, and in a steady voice said, “ I hope your baby suffers and dies.”

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First on the scene: the Westdene Dam bus disaster

10 April 2017 5 Comments

Dr Jill McIlraith

As a fifth year medical student at University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, I was one of the first on the scene when a double-decker bus carrying 72 high school students went off the causeway of a small suburban dam in March 1985. 42 children drowned that afternoon.

I lived opposite the Westdene Dam and was at home that Wednesday afternoon, having been up late the night before doing my emergency medicine attachment at Johannesburg Hospital’s Casualty Department. Hearing a woman yelling for help, I went outside to see a handful of people in the water, some clambering onto the just-submerged roof of a bus.

‘Taking my mother to the opera’ by Diane Brown

10 April 2017 3 Comments

Diane Brown

Diane Brown explains how writing a poetic family history brought her parents springing back to life.

A friend who rang on my birthday asked what I was doing. Writing a blog about Taking My Mother To The Opera, about dementia and brain damage, I said, so a nice cheery day.

In truth, I found writing about my parents difficult and sad at times but also funny and strangely joyful. Dementia had taken some of my mother away and my father had died by the time I began to assemble the book with old and new poems. It became a way of re-engaging with them as they miraculously sprang back to life.”