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.
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
[Read more…] about Doctoring fabric: an after-hours affliction
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.
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
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.
Claire Macindoe
In 1939, a thirteen year old boy called Roger Kingsford was admitted to Nelson Hospital with osteomyelitis, a septic infection of the bone in his right leg. The infection was non-responsive to sulphonamides, the only antibiotic treatment available at the time. Despite a preventative amputation, the infection spread and Roger developed osteomyelitis in his right arm and left leg. During the next few years he became chronically and seriously ill. In the early 1940s, after hearing reports about a new drug which was being successfully used to treat bacterial infections in soldiers, Roger’s parents appealed to the New Zealand government for access to penicillin.
[Read more…] about The ‘Miracle Drug’: penicillin’s first use in New Zealand
Charlotte Parallel
We know our heartbeat intimately. We can feel it through our skin and fingers as the internal pulsing of blood, muscles contracting and expanding in a rhythm that is our own. To hear our sinus rhythm ‘outside’ our body is quite an unusual experience, but this was the basis of my participatory sound-works show, Waves and bodies in waves in bodies.
