Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Depression: back from the dead and celebrating life

12 September 2016 1 Comment

Mark Thomas

Like a shorter, slower version of the great All Black John Kirwan, I have decided to speak up about depression. My life is fantastic and I get immense pleasure from my love of sport, travel and the amazing people around me. But here’s a simple statement of medical fact: I have experienced major episodes of clinical depression since the age of 18. I don’t know how that works, how the same mind that allows me to drink in life like an intoxicating nectar can also turn dog on me and drag me to the depths of emotional hell, but that is the truth of it. I do know that depression can afflict anyone, regardless of how good or seemingly enviable their life is, just as cancer, heart disease or any other illness can strike anybody, regardless of how happy, famous or wealthy they are.

The Act (not Art) of Drawing

12 September 2016 1 Comment

Louisa Baillie

Why? In our first years of life are we encouraged, and we ourselves desire, to learn of things beyond our skin barrier using touch, especially through our hands, attached as they are to the extremities of two highly mobile limbs, each hand with four fingers and an opposing thumb, 27 bones, 17 intrinsic muscles, 18 extrinsic muscles originating in the forearm, specialised nerve endings (including Merkel’s discs, Pacinian, Meissner’s and Ruffini’s corpuscles and hair follicle receptor lanceolate endings) which detect light or deep pressure, position, vibration, shapes, edges—hands that are trained to grasp, squeeze, pinch, pat, poke, point, that can stroke a polished surface of marble or plaster or a young baby’s skin and on that smoothness feel the merest rough patch of, say, a tiny grain of salt. Yet by the time a child in our culture is about seven years of age, her hands are already semi-retired. Why?

Doctoring fabric: an after-hours affliction

12 September 2016 2 Comments

Dr Tree Cocks

Disorder: Textile Junkie

Definition: Finding a length of fabric at the bottom of your stash, feeling it and falling in love with it all over again. You bring it to the top of the stash, sure (all over again) that you will find the perfect project to use it in.

Cure: There is none

Wild play: the education behind a great anatomist.

5 September 2016 1 Comment

Louisa Baillie

A baby, the family’s tenth and last child, is born in 1728 to a Scottish couple farming at East Kilbride, south of Glasgow. He is named John, with the hope that he will survive infancy, unlike a previous baby, also named John. The family is described as “struggling”. So it is likely there was no servant help for the substantial daily work load. I will imagine that near the house is a ‘kail yard’ to hoe, to grow kail (kale) the most commonly cultivated green. Close by are hens and a milking cow. On the farmland itself grow oats, and sheep and cattle. At lambing/calving season those farm animals require intense tending. I’ll bet that often the wind’s maw is bleak and cold. Animals are culled and butchered for home use, and sheep shorn for wool to spin then weave. Regularly the men tramp on and beyond the farm to hunt or snare wild game such as salmon, trout, rabbit, hare and grouse. Domestic tasks include milking of the cow, and from that milk the making of butter and cheese. There are clothes to stitch, candles to make, floors to sweep, a kitchen table to scrub, fires to tend, meals to cook and of course the physically demanding job of filling tubs with water for the hand washing of clothes. Why am I describing this? [Read more…] about Wild play: the education behind a great anatomist.

Cancer and all the other shit

5 September 2016 Leave a Comment

Mary McCallum and Lauren Wepa

Talking about cancer is tough and will test you. However talking is one of the small things that helps us feel normal—whatever that is.”

Lauren Wepa was 20 when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Cancer and all the other shit is the book she wrote to help people who don’t have cancer keep talking to people who do.

Mary McCallum interviews Lauren Wepa:

Cancer and all the other shit is a bitter, angry-sounding title. Is it a bitter, angry book?

I guess for some people it may come across like that but if you relate it back to the primary target audience (young people with cancer), that’s just how we describe a really dumb, unfortunate and not fun situation. And cancer can cause quite a bit of frustration, especially when there is a breakdown in communication between the patient and his or her family and friends. The aim of the title was not to scare people off but make them chuckle on the inside and make them want to read more. I’ve had a lot of positive feedback about that title, because that’s what cancer is, shit. [Read more…] about Cancer and all the other shit

How to be a Pisse-Prophet

5 September 2016 Leave a Comment

Professor Terence Doyle

In King Henry IV, the doughty Sir John Falstaff asks “Sirrah . . . what says the doctor to my water.” To which his page replies “He said, sir, the water was a good healthy water but for the party that owned it he might have more diseases than he knows for.” Urinoscopy, or the diagnosis of disease by studying the urine in the absence of the patient, was common in seventeenth century medicine, although the practice was outlawed by the College of Physicians in 1555.