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.
Laurence Fearnley
Novelist Laurence Fearnley walks on Dunedin’s Signal Hill every day, and as she walks she creates a map of the scents she encounters.
Paying attention to scent has resulted in a more intimate response to landscape, one that grows stronger with each change of season as my daily walks nurture my familiarity with the ground I cover. Every day Signal Hill grows more interesting and more beautiful.”
Barbara Brookes
Artsenta: the First 30 Years by Kath Beattie
We are often oblivious to the health initiatives taking place in our communities. This came home to me forcefully while reading the recently published history of Artsenta, a Dunedin-based supportive art studio which started life at Cherry Farm Psychiatric Hospital in the 1980s. Artsenta was the initiative of Dr Julia Aranui-Faed, and grounded in her belief that creativity is integral to well-being. Artsenta: the First 30 Years charts the evolution of this idea in practice, an idea whose philosophy is well-expressed by long-time Artsenta staff member Heather Martin:
… to focus on art and the well bit inside everyone”. [Read more…] about Creative Spaces in the Community: ‘Artsenta: the First 30 Years’
Chris Nichol
My mother-in-law has a radio in her head. She enjoys audio hallucinations. Well, “enjoy” may not be the word. Sometimes, I think, she enjoys them. At other times she endures them. The real problem is she can’t turn them off. For the best part of a year now she’s been concerned that muzak is regularly playing in her apartment. She’s asked us to have a word with the management to get it turned off. Unfortunately we can’t hear it at all. It’s not playing for us.
Dr Simon Brebner
I couldn’t draw well at school, and therefore wasn’t good at ‘Art’. Since then, however, I’ve enjoyed bolting three-dimensional works together. I blessedly still don’t have to draw anything, but can use my imagination and discipline to make pieces that, I hope, eventually feel balanced. [Read more…] about The Lightbox Skeleton
Professor Terence Doyle
Like most works of art, William Hogarth’s The Company of Undertakers has hidden depths. The early eighteenth century was a time of increasing freedom of expression, associated with the rise of a thinking middle class in society, after the Revolution of 1688. Hypocrisy in social and moral values came under particular scrutiny; and satire was a popular vehicle for such criticism.
Sue Wootton
There is a long and noble tradition of doctors who write about medicine. The best of this writing brings to the page powerful insights about what it means to be a human being—the kind of insights that are sparked when the steel of medical science is struck by the flint of medicine’s art. Language is one of the key medical arts, and memoir and essays make wonderful genres for the development of such sparks.
[Read more…] about 4 doctor writers: Oliver Sacks, Paul Kalanithi, Gavin Francis and David Galler
