conversations about medicine and life
We publish a range of perspectives on health and wellbeing, especially reflective work which fleshes out the biomedical version of illness and disability.
Isabelle Lomax-Sawyers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Dr Hamish Wilson
In the last couple of decades, I have watched many fishermen carefully release their trout back into the river. Then they often let out a great sigh as they sit back on their haunches and breathe out for the first time in several minutes. This particular sigh sounds like ‘Phow’, an exclamation that seems to combine ‘Phew’ (a feeling of relief) and ‘Wow’ (an amazing success).
It is only in the last 20 years or so however, that I have learned how to catch and then release each trout. It was always winter when Dad took our family to the Waitahanui River near Taupo, and the trout were all rainbows. We used a sinking line to cast across and down the river, swinging a fly in front of the trout as they made their way upstream to spawn. We used a Red Setter fly exclusively, a large fluffy fly which probably imitates trout roe – or perhaps those fish just snapped at anything that moved. Once we had figured out the ‘lie’ in each pool where fish rested, we usually caught a few, and kept them to eat. My mother would bake the trout in the oven, or we smoked them to enjoy later. [Read more…] about The ‘Phow’ moment: In praise of catch and release
