Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

For the past year or so I have been researching and writing the history of family caregiving. Let me say that in no way can this be a comprehensive piece of work! I have chosen to focus mainly on care of the elderly, since this reflects my professional experience as a social worker.

“It’s just what we do.”^[1] This quote opens Tim Cook’s 2007 The History of the Carers’ Movement, which outlines the history of the British organisation now known as Carers UK.^[2] But caring for others goes back a long, long time, as Lorna Tilley demonstrates in her fascinating book Theory and Practice in the Bioarcheology of Care. She quotes a number of bioarchaeological authorities who say that most remains of older Neanderthal showed healing, ‘implying that the Neanderthals had achieved a level of societal development where disabled individuals were well cared for by others of the social group’.^[3]

Translating Frank Koenegracht

27 June 2016 Leave a Comment

Koenraad Kuiper

Doctor poet Frank Koenegracht is, as it says in his publicity, ‘one of the best, albeit not yet best-known, poets of the Dutch language area.’ For a day job he has been a psychiatrist specialising in sleep disorders.

He was born in Rotterdam in 1945 and has published ten volumes of poetry all with De Bezige Bei (The Busy Bee). He has received two prizes for his work: in 1990 the Anna Blaman Prize an in 2001 the Frans Erens Prize for his collective work.

His poetry often employs a vernacular style and picks up pop music allusions, has flashes of humour but is seriously involved with the human condition.

Voices in the dark

27 June 2016 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

One day when I was seventeen I woke up in a hospital. The ward was long and echoey. Far away, I saw a nurse’s station with a couple of figures moving behind its glass. Mine was the last bed in a row of identical beds, next to a window. It was a windy, cloudy day. The last thing I remembered it had been evening, and I was at home.

My head was sore and weighty. I closed my eyes. Rather, my eyes closed. The next time I woke it was to my mother’s voice. I heard fear in it despite her attempt at humour. “Oh Susan,” she said, “how could you have an accident in those awful dungarees?”

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Tools of the Trade

20 June 2016 Leave a Comment

Dr Lesley Morrison

On the bookmark inside Tools of the Trade, a little pocket book of poems for new doctors, is a poem by the doctor poet Gael Turnbull, ‘Lines for a Bookmark’:

You who read..
May you seek
As you look;
May you keep
What you need;
May you care
What you choose;
And know here
In this book
Something strange,
Something sure,
That will change
You and be yours.

Gael Turnbull, from There Are Words: Collected poems (Shearsman Press, 2006), by permission of the author’s Estate.

This was and is very much our aspiration for this project, to enhance the experience of being a new doctor, and to provide a comforting, supporting and illuminating friend.

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Poetry and memory: Alzheimer’s and a spoon

20 June 2016 Leave a Comment

Liz Breslin

Some people process the world through paycheques, others through the haircuts on their neighbours, or the shoes they look down at or the latest thing the Internet says. As a writer I process relentlessly through words and words and words.

So when my grandmother, on the other side of the world, started her decline into Alzheimer’s, it was her language, or rather, the sudden and marked change in it, that drew me in to the pathos of her story. She’d grown up speaking Polish, using English as a second language and England as a refuge at the conclusion of the Second World War. Her English disappeared first, fast. Her Polish came forth, lingered.

Medical Training and the Humanities: a study

20 June 2016 Leave a Comment

Dr Joe Baker

We are told medical students flourish with a good dose of the humanities but as with all interventions the verification is in the dessert. Even the most gorgeous sounding of approaches should have its outcomes considered.

In recent years medical students have had lists of recommended readings thrust upon them. I wanted to know how these students had turned out as doctors and how literature might have influenced their practices.

My first study subject was Dr Laurence Gielgud who, as a second year student, was encouraged to read the works of Shakespeare. Gielgud set up the aptly named Globe Medical Centre in a leafy Dunedin suburb in the 1990s. We agreed to meet there one Tuesday. Unfortunately when I arrived he had just been called away.