Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

A privileged job

17 October 2016 13 Comments

Jillian Sullivan

When the job seeker representative asked me what qualifications I had for a job, I told her I had a Masters degree. “Don’t put anything high faluting like that on your job sheet,” she told me. “You’re only going to end up a cleaner.”

I think of that sometimes when I’m scrubbing toilets in the middle of the night in my job as Hospital Aid in a small country hospital.

And if I ever needed a reminder that this is a privileged job, I think of the young woman I was on shift with one night, telling me in the kitchen, “One night my friends hassled me. They said, You have to clean up shit. And they laughed at me. And I said, Yes I do. Because those people need someone to help them. And then they went quiet. And they haven’t hassled me since.”

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No more with the deathly silence

17 October 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

Death, especially unexpected death, is the lure of much of the click bait we are offered in online news headlines. Likewise, sudden and/or violent death is central to the plot of many television shows, films and video games. Sometimes the resulting corpses are even autopsied for our viewing pleasure. A Martian watching us watch our screens would surely consider us a death-obsessed species. But it’s a revealing obsession: the kind of half-horrified half-titillated fascination that comes from flirting with the forbidden. Ours is, in truth, a death-denying culture.

But things are changing. Perhaps it’s because the baby boomers are getting old, and waking up to the fact that there’s no special dispensation for anyone: the petals of even the most beautiful former flower children eventually wither and die. Whatever the reason, people are beginning to talk, seriously talk, about death.

Two of many recent publications that tackle the subject are We’re all going to die: a Joyful book about Death by Dr Leah Kaminsky, and Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Teaches us about Life and Living by historian Brandy Schillace.

NEOLIThs Conference: Day Two

10 October 2016 Leave a Comment

Dr Joe Baker

The first speaker on day two of the recent conference of the North and East Otago Literature Is Therapy Society (NEO-LITh-S) was Professor Iain U Endoe. Professor Endoe believes health professionals are talented actors who, more than any other group except perhaps, err, actors—and of course politicians—are able to radically modify their presenting personas according to the circumstances they encounter. A healthcare worker can discuss rugby with a freezing worker and then immediately go on to discuss post-modern concepts with a professor of literature, feigning interest all the while.

But there are limits, and if that limit is reached health workers may revert back to their innate states, with all their associated prejudices and offensive behaviours. Professor Endoe presented a case where a GP, “James”, transformed his usual solitary, rugged and stoic Cantabrian character into mellow bonhomie when called out to help a holiday maker from Paris who had met with misfortune. It was the severe unrelenting uni-directional banter which eventually led James to break his role play: [Read more…] about NEOLIThs Conference: Day Two

Waves from a storm: thoughts on suicide

10 October 2016 Leave a Comment

Dr Jill McIlraith

For a doctor, suicide of a patient interrupts the therapeutic relationship like no other death. There is no recovery, no chance to rescue the unique partnership of the doctor and that patient: only a cauldron of questions and emotions.

Healing the scars of persecution

10 October 2016 1 Comment

Barbara Brookes

How do people heal the scars of persecution? This question arose for us when visiting Dachau, where a relative spent about a month in late 1938. Unlike many others, he was fortunate in being released, promising to leave Germany. In fact he had been trying to get his family out for some time, but being over 40 made it difficult to get entry anywhere (New Zealand had turned him down earlier in 1938). Acceptance came—for about 800 Jewish refugees—from the Dominican Republic, where the dictator, Trujillo, accepted immigrants while at the same time treating Haitians ruthlessly. Trujillo’s dictatorship is brilliantly depicted by the Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, in The Feast of the Goat. [Read more…] about Healing the scars of persecution

The Gospel of Singing

3 October 2016 1 Comment

Chris Nichol

Gospel singers Last week we went to church, Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in New Orleans, to be precise. While we were there we witnessed, and took part in, some transformative singing. The experience was something like this.

More learned people than me would find ways to explain the power of this kind of participative performance in psychological or chemical terms. They’d probably be right. But they’d also have missed the point. The point has to do with exhilaration, an elation that transported some people and will serve to sustain others through the coming week.