Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Emily Siedeberg, New Zealand’s first woman doctor

3 April 2017 Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

The question of the propriety of teaching women medical students first came before the medical staff at Dunedin hospital in 1891. If the decision had been left to them, Emily Siedeberg, New Zealand’s first woman doctor, might well have not been able to pursue her chosen field. Having been admitted to study medicine at the University of Otago, Emily Siedeberg wrote to the Trustees of the hospital to enquire if there was any objection to her attending the hospital as a medical student. The trustees canvassed the opinions of the hospital staff who sent their responses in writing.

This funny old thing called life

3 April 2017 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Tough, irritating, painful, sad, irritating, mystifying, ridiculous, absurd, terrifying: getting through the days can be a strange old business. Sometimes you could sit down and weep – indeed, there are times when this is exactly what’s required. Sometimes though, you just have to laugh.

One thing about this funny old thing called life is that we’re all in the same boat. We’re all absurd, we’re all ridiculous, we’re all scared and we’re all going to die. Sharing our vulnerability with a dose of good humour is, as it turns out, a healthy thing to do. Laughter has well documented physiological benefits. It lowers blood pressure, releases feel-good endorphins, stimulates the internal organs, improves short term memory and increases pain tolerance. Laughter is a fantastic natural social lubricant; it reduces hostilities, dismantles barriers and enhances relationships, whether personal,political or professional.

Ambushed by grief

27 March 2017 Leave a Comment

Max Reid

It has been a challenging few weeks, a time when I have been caught between competing professional and emotional obligations – conducting my mother-in-law’s funeral on the one hand, and grieving her death on the other. Funerals should be familiar territory for me. As a Presbyterian minister for over a decade, during which time I also had a period as a Hospice Chaplain, I conducted hundreds of funerals, reflecting and writing extensively on that aspect of my ministry.

Coordinating the funeral arrangements – both practical and pastoral – for my mother-in-law drew me back into a professional space I had left many years before. All in the midst of grieving for someone who had become my second mother, indeed a mother whom I had come to know and love and relate to for longer as an adult than I had my own mother, who had died 25 years earlier. My wife – a nurse – found herself facing a similar tension in the days leading up to her mother’s death. One cannot shake off one’s professional role and obligations any more than one can shake off the emotional ones.

[Read more…] about Ambushed by grief

Ghost School: learning to live

27 March 2017 1 Comment

Rachel Stedman

I began working in healthcare when I was a student, before graduating into physiotherapy and, more latterly, working for ACC, Ministry of Health and a number of District Health Boards. That’s thirty-something years in total. Scary, how time flies.

I also write fiction. So, given my working life has been in healthcare, I suppose it was inevitable that at least one book would be set in the world of a hospital. After all: write what you know. This is the story of that book, and how I discovered that, despite a lifetime in the sector, I knew next to nothing about healthcare.

On What Matters: Derek Parfit (1942-2017)

27 March 2017 Leave a Comment

Andrew Moore

Derek Parfit died on 2 January 2017. He was a philosopher, whose work focused on personal identity, the basis of ethics, and our obligations to future beings. The title of his 2011 book states his overall focus: On What Matters. He was a distinctive person, and he produced strikingly original and influential work.

I was a final year BA student in philosophy at the University of Canterbury when Parfit published his first book in 1984. Seven years later he was an examiner of my Oxford D.Phil. thesis. He gave me a fair grilling and a fair go.

He was born on 11 December 1942 in Chengdu, China, the second of the three children of Jessie and Norman Parfit. Jesse and Norman practised preventive medicine in Christian missionary hospitals. Soon after Derek’s birth they moved back to the UK. Derek’s school record was outstanding in every subject except mathematics. He ‘read’ for a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in history at Balliol College, Oxford, 1961-64. Seven years after they get their BA, Oxford BA graduates are awarded the degree of Master of Arts. That was his highest degree. Following a period in the USA as a Harkness Fellow, in 1967 he won a Prize Fellowship to All Souls College, Oxford. It remained his primary academic base. In 1983 or so, Parfit met Janet Radcliffe Richards, author of the 1980 book The Sceptical Feminist. They got together some months later, and were together for the rest of his life.

Reflections from the Medical School graduating class of 1971.

20 March 2017 2 Comments

Charlotte Paul and Sarah Romans

You young women are taking the place of a man.”

Click here to view full size 1968 class photo

In 1971, seventeen women were among the 120 graduates in medicine at the University of Otago. 44 years later, fifteen of the sixteen who were still alive wrote brief life stories, and in November 2015 fourteen of us met for a three day reunion. The naysayers were wrong: we had all practised medicine for many years, with just one giving up after thirty years to pursue other interests, and none of us regretted having chosen a medical career. Three had retired in the last few years but the rest were still practising, aged 67 or older. What follows are insights gleaned from this group of women, as we reflected on the time before we started university, our time together at Medical School, and our lives as medical practitioners. We also reflected on the process of meeting again, nearly fifty years after entering Medical School, and we now offer some insights to our successors, the women studying medicine today.