conversations about medicine and life
We publish a range of perspectives on health and wellbeing, especially reflective or creative work which fleshes out the biomedical version of illness and disability.
Dr Janine Winters
When I started my career shift from Hospital Medicine to Palliative Medicine in 2004, my mother asked me “Why in the world do you want to work with people who are going to die? That is so depressing.” My answer then and my answer now is the same. “I am a doctor, I already work with people who are dying—and I know it can be done better.”
Kevin Pringle
The first poem I wrote about a patient was when I was working in Iowa City at the University of Iowa as a professor of Paediatric Surgery. Matt was a classmate of our younger daughter Fiona in Junior High (roughly equivalent to New Zealand’s Intermediate). He developed a tumour on one of his ribs, which I attempted to remove, unsuccessfully.
Bittersweet. Bitter more than sweet.
I did my best, and felt I let you down.”– from “Matt” by Kevin Pringle
[Read more…] about Swapping the scalpel for the pen: a surgeon writes
Pamela Wood
I knew he had died. Before reading the letters, I knew the end of his story. Sergeant Charles Leonard (Len) Hooper from Masterton, serving with the New Zealand Machine Gun Battalion on the Western Front, died in November 1918 in France just four days before the Armistice. His letters to his English fiancée, Elizabeth Sibthorp of Hornchurch – his ‘dearest Lizzie’ – are bundled in a grey folder loosely laced with thin white tape, held in the Imperial War Museum archive in London.
Sue Wootton
… Now we insert the point
of an elevator in the peridontal space.”– from “A Patient” by Alan Roddick.
There are not many poets who can confidently use the phrase ‘peridontal space’ in a poem. Indeed, I know only one: dentist poet Alan Roddick, whose long awaited second collection, Getting it Right, has just appeared. It follows at a stately remove from its predecessor, The Eye Corrects, which was published in 1967. The poems collected in Getting it Right feel honed, polished, clear. They celebrate the natural world, love and life (there is only the one poem which overtly mentions dentistry, so dentophobics need not fear opening the book), and Roddick brings his steady eye and hand to every line.
[Read more…] about Tasty medicinal words! Poems by Alan Roddick
Jenny Bornholdt
“Big Minty Nose” is one of six long poems that made up my book The Rocky Shore. They’re about all kinds of things, mostly illness, death (keeping it cheerful here!), the garden, kids and family. “Big Minty Nose” is the final poem in the book. I was recovering from a year of pain, then hip surgery; our friend Nigel had died of cancer and I was thinking about my father’s death from melanoma some years earlier. Writing about these things helped me find a place for them inside our daily life, which is where they will always be.
