Lauren A. Mitchell // I am helping a group of medical students learn how to take a comprehensive sexual history with a colleague, inspired by the interview template that Fenway Health in Boston uses. This interview model expands on the usual “5 Ps of Sexual History Taking” (Pregnancy, Practices, Partners, Past History of…
Author: AnEyeToward
Medicine groupie, activist, and doula turns into a coltish literature scholar.
A for Abortion: The Weaponized Vocabulary of a Medical Procedure
Lauren A. Mitchell// The OED defines Abortion as, “The deliberate termination of a human pregnancy, most often performed during the first 28 weeks of pregnancy; The expulsion of a fetus from the uterus by natural causes before it is able to survive independently; An object or undertaking regarded by the speaker as unpleasant or badly…
Medicine, Myth, Fairytale: On Joanna Pearson’s Every Human Love
Lauren A. Mitchell // On the phone, Dr. Joanna Pearson softly chuckles. “My brother sometimes asks me what ‘psychiatrist Joanna’ would ask ‘author Joanna.’” It has been a while since we’ve spoken, but she is warm and upbeat, as I have known her to be. We are discussing her new short story collection, Every Human…
Demonizing Mothers: Psychodramas, Horror Movies, and Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Lauren A. Mitchell// Fair warning: this post contains some spoilers for Ari Aster’s Hereditary, but you should read it anyway. Early in Ari Aster’s 2018 Hereditary, family matriarch and film anti-heroine Annie Leigh attends a grief support meeting after the death of her mother. We learn that Annie and her mother, Ellen, had at best a conflicted…
Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation”: Uncanny Neuroscience and the Radical Self-Exam
Lauren Mitchell // Ted Chiang’s short story “Exhalation,” which you can read online here, evokes pleasure alongside mourning. Written from the perspective of a nameless anatomist in a mechanized future, Chiang re-casts the body as an “extraordinary machine,” where air, flesh and blood is replaced by argon, metal and gold.
The Theatre of Presidential Cruelty from American Psycho to The House that Jack Built
Lauren A. Mitchell // By way of a preface, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks lingering over the subject of this post about how Donald Trump has been an inspiration for a number of violent imaginary characters. When I originally put it up, it was right before news of the Pittsburgh Tree of…