Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Here be Lavender

13 March 2017 1 Comment

David Goodwin

The word “mapping” usually gets my attention, so I was intrigued to read Laurence Fearnley’s Corpus post, Scent mapping, Signal Hill. I imagined that she would have created a depiction of Signal Hill with delineated areas where certain scents predominated, probably colour-coded and overlapping syllogistically in places. In other words, scents experienced in real life would be mapped to defined areas on a small scale pictorial representation of real life. Captions would be along the lines of “Here be lavender,” and “Bracken, with the bouquet of gorse in season”. This was a map that I really wanted to see, and to sniff at. But Laurence’s article and a subsequent email disabused me. She saw her map as “dynamic rather than static, with ‘map’ being more of a verb than a noun.” More along the lines of what Alfred Gell refers to as a “mental map”: a process, not a picture. The Signal Hill scent map existed in Laurence’s brain, not on paper.

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On rabies

13 March 2017 1 Comment

Dr Anna Holmes

I first encountered rabies in Trincomalee, Ceylon, in 1947. The father of one of my friends at school died suddenly. I remember sitting quietly while the adults talked in hushed voices about “hydrophobia” and how “their throats close up when they want to drink”. The other thing they said was “The treatment is ten days of injections into the tummy”. I felt sad for my friend and her family, and anxious at the thought of ten injections – I loathed being stuck with needles. I was also upset that the puppy, which our mother had found for us, was sent away. In those days there was no immunisation for dogs.

Later, at medical school in Edinburgh, we were told about rabies and what a scourge it was in many parts of the world. The treatment was serial injections with immunoglobulin as soon as possible after infection.

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Johann Remmelin: a story of a 17th century anatomy flap book

6 March 2017 2 Comments

Dr Katherine Hall

In 1613, Johann Remmelin (1583-1632) published the first edition of his anatomy flap book. A 1667 edition, printed from the same printer blocks as the first, is held in the Health Sciences Library at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Recently, with colleagues Dr Simone Marshall and K. John Dennison, I had the opportunity to study it closely.

Ageing poetically

6 March 2017 1 Comment

Janet Wainscott

Gary Glazner and Poetry Project participant

Some years ago, when my mother was still alive and living in a dementia-level rest home, I sat in a meeting for residents’ family members. The discussion turned to activities. One woman said her mother loved poetry, and asked whether poetry could be included in the activities offered. Someone else endorsed the comment and I thought that it would be something that my poetry-loving mother would enjoy. Nothing happened, but later, after my mother’s death, I decided it was an idea worth pursuing.

I was aware that reading, including poetry, is used in some rest homes and day programmes for older people, but I wanted to go beyond reading, discussion and reminiscence. I looked to Gary Glazner’s Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in the USA, and John Killick’s UK dementia poetry programme, In the Pink, for inspiration and guidance. Both projects combined the sharing of poems (especially well-known poems) with the creation of new poems.

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Unbelonging

6 March 2017 Leave a Comment

Majella Cullinane

In her early twenties, Majella Cullinane set out to explore Africa, the continent she had longed to visit since reading Out of Africa as a teenager in her homeland, Ireland. But in Mozambique, Cullinane suddenly found herself in the grips of a culture shock so severe that it threatened to overwhelm all her previous notions of personal identity. Now a writer herself, Cullinane reflects on the visceral terror of that experience:

Unbelonging

You lie awake in a small room. Lightning illuminates the dressing table, the chair, the curtains. Thunder bruises the night sky with a fist of rage. The rain comes down hard, like a deluge of nails on a corrugated iron roof. It is this sound that takes you back. Up and away to a ninth floor apartment, to another continent. A levitating memory. Where you find yourself in another room, this one marble floored with a high ceiling.

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Words in times of loss

27 February 2017 Leave a Comment

Barbara Snook

During my life I have had more opportunities than most to witness people struggling with words to express sympathy. Not only did my parents die well before their time, but I have lost a son, a husband and a daughter out of the natural order of things. I do not presume to speak on behalf of all bereaved persons, but for me, I appreciated people taking the time to say something – anything. There are no answers or magic words of comfort that take the pain away, but it has always helped me when people open up a conversation about my children or my husband.