Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Island of shame

20 February 2017

Barbara Brookes

Boys diseased in body, and sullied in soul, lost forever as builders of our country” – Mrs Harrison Lee Cowie, in Ashburton Guardian, 8 June, 1917

Mrs Cowie, of the ‘Strength of the Nation’ movement, was referring to boys being held at Quarantine Island (Kamau Taurua) in Otago harbour (Dunedin, New Zealand). At least Mrs Cowie ventured to discuss the subject in public. When the New Zealand House of Representatives were to debate the war regulations relating to venereal disease in July 1916, women were asked to leave the public galleries. Such an indelicate subject was not one for their ears. By this time, ninety soldiers were already ‘segregated on a certain quarantine station’. Proclaiming that he was not the ‘Minister of Morals but the Minister of Health’, George Russell sought measures to prevent the spread of the disease be believed to be ‘rampant’, spread ‘in lavatories, privies, and barbers’ shops, by the use of towels, the kissing of children, the smoking of infected pipes, and in other ways’.

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Tai Chi and breast cancer: a research project

13 February 2017 Leave a Comment

Dr Lizhou Liu

Dr Lizhou Liu is a recipient of the 2017 New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation’s Belinda Scott Clinical Fellowship. Her research will look at the effects of incorporating Tai Chi into the active treatment programme for women with breast cancer.

Many people think of Tai Chi as the exercise with the slow, funny movements. In fact, Tai Chi is a weight-bearing mind-body activity that incorporates physical movement, mindful meditation, and controlled breathing. It is a moderate intensity aerobic exercise (equivalent to walking), and uses slow, deliberate movements coordinated with deep, regulated breathing and imagery to strengthen and relax the body and mind.

Emergency poet!

13 February 2017 Leave a Comment

Deborah Alma

Emergency Poet is a piece of theatre, a quack doctor show and also at its heart, a vehicle (pun-intended) for sharing and disseminating poetry. I travel to city centres, festivals, libraries, hospitals, conferences, schools – I have even been to a couple of weddings! My last ‘emergency’ call-out was to a conference of psychotherapists and psychiatrists for the UK National Health Service.

Dressed in a doctor’s white coat and stethoscope and accompanied either by Nurse Verse or a Poemedic, I travel in my vintage 1970s ambulance, which is still fitted with its original stretchers and medical equipment. It’s a mix of the serious and the theatrical. There are skulls, jars of eyeballs and other body parts inside the ambulance, and under an attached awning there is a ‘Cold Comfort Pharmacy’ with Nurse Verse dispensing poems-in-pills for various ailments, including internet addiction and anxiety. There’s even some poetry Viagra.

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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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