conversations about medicine and life
Pamela Wood
I knew he had died. Before reading the letters, I knew the end of his story. Sergeant Charles Leonard (Len) Hooper from Masterton, serving with the New Zealand Machine Gun Battalion on the Western Front, died in November 1918 in France just four days before the Armistice. His letters to his English fiancée, Elizabeth Sibthorp of Hornchurch – his ‘dearest Lizzie’ – are bundled in a grey folder loosely laced with thin white tape, held in the Imperial War Museum archive in London.
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.
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
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.
Dr Barbara Brookes
