Tag: Spring 2015
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The truth in facts is a derelict ruin: Forging a self through fiction
Sara BakerAthens, Georgia, United States In his June 2, 2014 New Yorker article Inheritance,1 Ian Parker explores the connection between British novelist Edward St. Aubyn’s early traumatic life and his fiction. When we think of healing through writing, we usually think first of memoir and then perhaps of lyric poetry. Yet fiction offers advantages that…
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The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and the diagnostic gaze as moral authority in The Great Gatsby
Rachel BrackenHouston, Texas, United States The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his…
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Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: About a whistling pneumothorax and pulmonary tuberculosis
Peter KorstenGöttingen, Germany Originally intended as a novella, Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) multilayered novel The Magic Mountain documents in fine detail the methods used to treat lung diseases and especially pulmonary tuberculosis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, who intended to spend only three weeks in the sanatorium in the Swiss mountains…
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Cultural warfare: Investigating childbirth practices in Doctor Zhivago
Stephanie ColelloNew York, United States I was fortunate to spend a year studying the transformation of Russian childbirth practices through the lens of Russian literature—an endeavor that at first glance may seem farfetched. However, I quickly realized that no birth scene is written as a proverbial “island”; often stemming directly from the societal perception of…
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Historical contraception: Birth control before “the pill”
Emily DavidsonChapel Hill, United States Since the advent of the birth control pill, birth control advocates claim that women’s control over their reproductive potential increased the proportion of women in the US workforce over the course of the 20th century (Fig 1). Long before the oral contraceptive pill’s emergence, however, women found ways to control…
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Alexander Gordon and puerperal fever
C. John ScottAberdeen, Scotland The epidemic of childbed (puerperal) fever that struck the city of Aberdeen, Scotland, between December 1789 and March 1792 was unusual. It occurred not in the dirty, crowded, and ill-ventilated wards of lying-in hospitals, but throughout the city and surrounding villages. Serendipitously, one doctor cared for most of the patients. This…
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Saint Sebastian nursed by Saint Irene
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States She wears neither latex gloves nor mask, yet Saint Irene performs surgery of the most epic kind, shown here pulling a deadly arrow from the thigh of Saint Sebastian. He was a Roman soldier who incurred the wrath of Emperor Diocletian for protecting Christian martyrs. She, the surgeon-nurse, was a…
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Bush medicine leaves
Rose TaskerAdelaide, Australia The leaves of the Kurrajong, or Kurrawong tree (Brachychiton1) have been captured in several paintings by Australian Aboriginal women artists. These stylistic and iconic paintings first gained international attention in 1999, when one work by Gloria Petyarre (1945 – ) won the Australian “Wynne Prize” for landscape. Pictured here, the winning piece,…
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The doctor and the doll
Ravi ShankarAruba, Kingdom of the Netherlands Norman Rockwell, one of the most famous American artists of the twentieth century, depicted ordinary American life from an optimistic perspective. He once stated that he did not portray the ugly and the sordid, but portrayed life as he would like it to be. One of his paintings, Doctor…