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.
[Read more…] about Reflections from the Medical School graduating class of 1971.
In 2002 my youngest daughter, Rebecca, died of a rare appendix cancer at the age of 23. For a whole year afterwards I couldn’t say her name and the word ‘died’ in the same breath. Though I am a writer, I lost not only the capacity to articulate my feelings, but also the capacity to write. I stopped dreaming. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to be inside my skin. The silence of my own home, the beauty of my garden, the breath of my animals, the quiet paddocks and the river walks provided no refuge. They were all empty spaces that reverberated with Rebecca’s absence. This new territory was so bleached of colour, so arid and alien, so lacking in anything recognisable that I had no language to negotiate my way through it. And I could form no response to comments such as “Gosh, you’re coping so well.”
Sustained engagements and entanglements with the activities of massage therapy, counselling, arts therapy and teaching have taught me a lot about the potency of presence in the phenomena of healing, learning, creativity and renewal. There’s a particular quality of presence – both of a person and a process of encounter – that makes a difference. Such a presence, in my experience, is a mediation of a number of influences and practices, one of them being attentive curiosity. Attentive curiosity could be considered a methodology of presence.
The word “mapping” usually gets my attention, so I was intrigued to read Laurence Fearnley’s Corpus post, 
