Month: April 2019
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Swaddling: Forever bound in controversy?
Jennifer BorstHammonds Plains, Nova Scotia As a bleary-eyed new parent, I found myself embracing the quiescence and prolonged slumber swaddling offered my restless and sleepless first-born. Strategic bundling subsequently proved disappointingly ineffective with my second colicky child and unnecessary with my jovial, naturally sleepy third. While the question to swaddle or not no longer applies…
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The Montreal Experiments: Brainwashing and the ethics of psychiatric experimentation
Shaan BhambraMontreal, Canada “We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”1– George Orwell, 1984 In the aftermath of World War II, the race to become the dominant world power motivated both the United States and the USSR to strive for influence, power, and military strength. In the mid-twentieth century, the brewing Cold War…
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Heroes and alcohol
Cal BartleyPenarth, South Wales, United Kingdom It would seem that literary heroes cannot function without alcohol, as so many great books reference alcohol in a positive light. Even if it does not lubricate the plot, a glance at many classics suggest that a stiff drink is needed for the hero to successfully reach the final…
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“Something monomanical”: obsession and the unity of effect
Jack RosserHerefordshire, England, United Kingdom The concept of monomania first gathered popularity in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the term “referred to a type of mental disorder in which a person would have fixed, and often grandiose, ideas that did not correspond to reality.”1 These ideas would be “confined to a single…
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Madness and gender in Gregory Doran’s Hamlet
Sarah BahrIndianapolis, Indiana, United States In director Gregory Doran’s 2009 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, David Tennant’s Hamlet becomes a bawdy lunatic who consciously or unconsciously uncouples himself from reality. The intentionality of Hamlet’s madness is more muddled than in Shakespeare’s text because of the confrontational quality Tennant lends to the prince’s mental angst. Tennant…
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“Love Tea” and The Antelope Wife
Sarah BahrIndianapolis, Indiana, United States Klaus Shawano’s abduction of the Ojibwe woman Sweetheart Calico in Louise Erdrich’s novel The Antelope Wife is hardly a congenial affair. He leads her to his van — nervous, not speaking — and gives her a cup of hot tea, which he refers to as “a sleep tea, a love…
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“If it be a poor man”: Medieval medical treatment for the rich and poor
Erin Connelly Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States “Urine Wheel,” Almanack, Free Library of Philadelphia – The Rosenbach, MS 1004/29, fol. 9 C (York, England, 1364), courtesy of Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis. OPenn Repository Great disparities in wealth and differences in access to healthcare between the top and bottom of society are hardly new experiences in human history.1-4 Even…
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The forgotten many of the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiments
Harsh PatoliaRoanoke, Virginia, United States In 2005, medical historian Dr. Susan Reverby foraged through boxes in the stuffy archives of the library of the University of Pittsburgh for the papers of Thomas Parran, the surgeon general who oversaw the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments of the mid-twentieth century. She had embarked on a quest to expose…
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The female body dissected: Anatomy and John Keats
Niamh Davies-BranchAberdeen, United Kingdom John Keats, poet of the great odes, was also a surgical apprentice at Guy’s Hospital, London from October 1815 to March 1817.1 Although he never spent a day as a surgeon, he completed six years of medical and surgical training. During this period, he maintained an active literary life, composing thirty-nine…