Essay – Corpus

“Start at once a bedside library”: narrative competence and medicine

4 September 2017 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Canadian physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919), sometimes called ‘the father of modern medicine’, urged doctors to maintain a lifetime habit of reading. In an address delivered at the opening of the Boston Medical Library in 1901, he said:

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.”

But, important though it was to keep up-to-date with the latest scientific findings, he did not want clinicians to limit themselves to reading medical texts. Osler advocated also reading broadly and deeply in the humanities and literature. He believed that “for physicians to be properly educated to practice their art, knowledge of the science of medicine … must be supplemented by familiarity with the humanities.”

Fictional doctors

14 August 2017 1 Comment

John Hale

Historically, plays, then novels, treated medical doctors as stock characters, often quacks or figures of fun, as in the Commedia dell’ Arte. Similarly, in Wycherley’s 1675 Restoration comedy, The Country Wife, the doctor serves as a device for the audience to be in the know, about Horner’s camouflage as a eunuch.

And Macbeth, telling the Doctor about his wife’s condition, understands it better than the doctor does:

that perilous stuff that weighs about the heart.

[Read more…] about Fictional doctors

A rhinestone cowboy in the waiting room

14 August 2017 6 Comments

Sue Wootton

From memory, for memory, and in memory.

I used to have a physiotherapy clinic in central Dunedin. One Friday evening I farewelled my final patient and began to tidy up before heading home. It had been a busy week and I was exhausted. Already mentally off-duty, I wandered into the waiting room to stack the magazines, and to my surprise and annoyance found two men sitting there. In an American drawl, one of them said, “My friend here needs an appointment.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but the clinic is closed.”

The man persisted. “This is very important,” he said. “He needs an appointment now.”

I glanced at the friend. He was certainly holding himself rigidly, as if in pain. But the very idea of treating one more patient that day was too much for me. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, “but I am closing now.”

The man amped up his appeal. It’s urgent; it’s necessary; it has to be done and you have to do it.

Vaccination debates and the pain of dividuality

7 August 2017 Leave a Comment

Susan Wardell

Dividuality: “the close proximity and unexpected pull of others in one’s life” (Garish Daswani 2011).

My ears are full of screaming: the name-calling, the CAPS, the exclamation points!!! Whenever vaccination comes up online, and comments are enabled, the conversation quickly devolves into an extremity of outrage and vitriol that reads to me like ‘moral panic.’

Coined in the late 1960s, the term ‘moral panic’ makes no judgement on the value of the issues under discussion. Rather, it highlights the social processes in the associated public discourse: the way that story, meaning, and affect coalesce around a particular social problem. Untangling an objective sense of risk from this is nigh on impossible. Besides, people are doing stupid, risky, and harmful things to each other, directly and indirectly, all day long, and in every part of the world. The question becomes not what to think of anti-vaxers, but why the panic about this particular issue, why here, and why now? I believe the answer is not purely medical, but also social and moral.

Mental health media coverage: looking past ‘spectacular and notorious’

31 July 2017 1 Comment

Katie Kenny and Laura Walters

“If you were to be crass, you could say there is a bit of a flavour of the month about it,” former Health Minister David Caygill says about mental health, during a conversation in a Christchurch cafe. It does sound crass, but it’s true. The shortfalls of our mental health system are a constant topic of discussion at the dinner table, in Parliament and in the media. Headlines claiming the system is “broken” or “on a knife edge” are frequent, and hard to ignore. You don’t have to look far to find a story about a mental health advocate calling for an independent review, or a grieving family member whose child killed themselves while in the care of services.

It is part of the media’s role to expose failings and hold those responsible to account. It’s relatively easy to point fingers and blame people in power. But, for us as journalists, it’s harder to look in the mirror and ask if we’re holding up our end of the bargain.

Unexpected benefits of a health education

31 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Rachel Stedman

I trained as a physiotherapist nearly thirty years ago, and worked in acute medicine and neuro rehabilitation in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. I ended my clinical practice about seven years back, and strangely I don’t miss it terribly; one moves onto other things.

I moved into business management and fiction writing. Rather unexpectedly, my clinical experience has proved extremely useful in my writing. Writers, you see, love healthcare. Hospitals provide dramatic opportunities, and a dramatic illness creates a chance to show something about a character. It’s not an accident that best-sellers feature terminal illnesses or genetic diseases.