Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Diary of a concussion

13 February 2017 1 Comment

Liz Breslin

November somethingth, 2016

Who’s the Prime Minister?

Why are you even asking me this? That guy in America? Let’s talk about him. Trump. No, that’s the wrong one. What’s the question? The Prime Minister. The smiler.

John Key?

I don’t mean it to come out like a question. I get another in return.

What date is it?

What the heck? I’ll just check my screen. Except I definitely don’t want to move off this floor. I’m sure it’ll be OK if I just say the day instead. It’s not like this is a test.

Sunday?

Our cadaver is male…

6 February 2017 Leave a Comment

Isabelle Lomax-Sawyers

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. Rembrandt, 1632. — *The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp*. Rembrandt, 1632.

Our cadaver is male. He was old when he died. I don’t remember his face.

There are maybe ten of us in our white coats. We crowd around the table where he lies in an open black body bag, his head resting on a block of wood. We drape a paper towel over his genitals. We have seen human remains before, single limbs unpeeled to varying degrees. He is whole. He is the first one that is ours.

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Ways of Seeing?

6 February 2017 2 Comments

Bruce Summers

My father-in-law, Eric Leary, was totally blind from the age of eight. During an impromptu children’s game of cricket on waste ground, somewhere in the East End of London, he was struck in the eye by a potato. This was in the 1920s: the bat was a plank of wood, the stumps a cardboard box, and the pitch just the distance from ‘ball’ to ‘bat’. The ball, of course, was the potato that changed his life forever. He was treated at Moorfields Eye Hospital but developed ‘complementary’ blindness in the other eye a few days later and subsequently had both eyes enucleated. Eric’s reaction to total blindness, as a child, was simple acceptance but later, as an adolescent and adult, he came to consider his accident as good fortune and an asset.

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Scarlet Fever, 1941: a memoir

6 February 2017 1 Comment

Wendy Fearnley

In 1941, at the age of five, Wendy Fearnley caught scarlet fever and spent seven weeks in isolation at the Monsall Fever Hospital, Manchester, UK. She explains what that was like:

It was 1941, and I was five years old and living in Manchester when I contracted Scarlet Fever. My memory begins in a side ward, with a doctor giving me an injection and me whining, ‘that’s 13 injections. I don’t want any more.’ He replied, ‘Not many more.’ This was before penicillin was available and I think I was treated with sulphur.

Art can handle us

30 January 2017 1 Comment

Rata Gordon

I work with young people who are experiencing so-called ‘mental illness’. To me, ‘mental illness’ is a misnomer. What I see are stunningly courageous and sensitive human beings who have somehow come to the conclusion that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Maybe they’ve been told that they shouldn’t look the way they do, or love who they love. Maybe they’ve been denied opportunities, or had their voice shut down. Somewhere along the way, they have internalised this sense of not being good enough.

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“The whole world couldn’t be mumbling”

30 January 2017 1 Comment

Ruth Arnison

When I first met my husband he mentioned that he was brought up in a terrorist house. That simple statement spiked my interest and I decided this was a guy I’d like to get to know. I was brought up in New Zealand South Island manses, absolutely tame compared to his London childhood I thought. By the time I figured out that he’d said terraced house I was in love with him which just proves that a hearing loss needn’t be construed as a negative disability!