Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

“That’s my stroke”: Expressive Arts Therapy with a survivor of stroke

11 July 2016 Leave a Comment

Rose Stanton

Arts Therapy is a form of psychotherapy which connects with a variety of theoretical frameworks. It is more focused on the creative process and self-understanding than on art as an end product. I practise the multimodal approach. This is the use of two or more expressive therapies to foster awareness, encourage emotional growth, and enhance relationships with others. The expressive arts therapies can be defined as “the use of art, music, dance/movement, drama, poetry/creative writing, play, and sandtray within the context of psychotherapy, counselling, rehabilitation or health care” Malchiodi (2005, p. 2).

Chemical legacies: Thalidomide in New Zealand

11 July 2016 Leave a Comment

Susanne M. Klausen

William Osler once said ‘one of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine’.^[1] Tragedies have unfolded when physicians and pharmacists, wooed by pharmaceutical companies as to the wonders of their products, have not heeded this advice.

“I sing the body electric”: Walt Whitman

11 July 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul”—Walt Whitman (1819-92).

Walt Whitman was a journalist and poet who volunteered as a nurse in 1863-4, during the American Civil War. His major work, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was revised and expanded over the course of nine editions during his lifetime (with a tenth edition published posthumously in 1897).

Whitman’s poetry is intensely observant of the physical world, and deeply attuned to seasonal cycles and the passage of time. Birth and death, aging, disease, injury, love and passion all appear in his work, which is renowned for its oratory style, and its celebration of the embodied nature of human experience. “I sing the body electric”, he wrote. “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”

The poem continues:

Why studying Milton and Plath might make you a better doctor

4 July 2016 1 Comment

Dr Jacob Edmond

I coordinate a University of Otago English paper, ENGL131: Controversial Classics, which is an approved eighth paper for Health Science First Year. As I posted on the course Facebook page, ENGL131 fosters the skills that a recent report suggests are the best predictors of success in the health professions: critical thinking, analysis, and communication.

Art, Science and Health: Why first year health science students should be able to study the humanities

4 July 2016 1 Comment

Dr Ruth Cunningham

Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.”
― Hippocrates

When I was finishing high school in the early 1990s and considering what to do next, several teachers and friends of my parents suggested that studying medicine might allow me to balance my interests and aptitudes in both art and science subjects, as well as offering a multitude of rewarding career opportunities.

And so I enrolled at Otago, hoping to be accepted to medical school, but wanting to keep my options open and excited by the opportunity to try new disciplines such as philosophy. In my first year I was able to study medieval history, modernist literature, epistemology and logic alongside the compulsory papers required. Other potential doctors around me studied anthropology, psychology, mathematics, Māori, even law.

The inert body alive on the page: June Opie’s Over My Dead Body

4 July 2016 4 Comments

Lucy Hunter

Over My Dead Body, Julie Opie June Opie was twenty-three when she contracted polio on her way to England from New Zealand in 1947. She spent two years in a London hospital, where she initially had no friends or family. Against terrible odds, June recovered from full-body paralysis and learned to walk again, albeit on crutches and with both legs in callipers. Her autobiography, Over My Dead Body, was published in 1957. It became an international best-seller in just ten days.