In 1822, Doctor William Beaumont helped heal a young man whose accidental gunshot wound left an open fistula in his abdomen. Reaching into the healed wound, Beaumont later performed experiments that would result in groundbreaking research on stomach acid and its digestive functions. In 1984, Octavia Butler published “Bloodchild”, a science fiction short story in…
Author: Heather Glenny
Heather (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She holds a PhD in English Language & Literature from UChicago. Her research centers medical education in the United States and the human body as a pedagogical object.
The Horror of Noncompliance: Instructional Language and Unruly Bodies in “The Substance” (2024)
Image Credit: “The Substance – Official Trailer.” YouTube, uploaded by NEON, 14 February 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNlrGhBpYjc. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as Victor Frankenstein starts building a female companion for his monstrous creature, he realizes: “…she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness….
“Phantom Fat”: Motivation Models and Gothic Pedagogy
As of writing this, I can buy a 1lb or 5lb silicone “fat replica” on Amazon for anywhere between $29.99 and $139.99. They’re lumpy, brain-like oval shaped masses in an almost glowing yellow, sometimes with small red threads representing blood vessels visible through their semi-opacity. The names of each product link has Amazon’s signature word…
“Edible Panopticons”: Hour-Man, the Pill, and the Superpower of Pharmaceutical Autonomy
Before he was the square-chested, slick-haired icon, Superman was a villain’s pharmaceutical test subject. In their 1933 short story, “The Reign of the Superman,” Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster (who would later create the iconic Clark Kent comics) describe an evil chemist who goes to the bread-line and indiscriminately chooses one of the many “disillusioned…
(Dis)articulation: “Broken Ladies” and the Anatomized Female Body
Articulating symptoms of illness often first requires dis-articulation: this part hurts; this one thing happened; I started feeling this, then this; are these things related? First narrativized as a series of observations, symptoms separate out into individual signs (one symptom, after all, could be the effect of one cause, but a different symptom could be…
Prescription Rage: On Teaching Susan Stryker, ‘Frankenstein,’ and Affect in Medical Discourse
My university students are very good at behaving. They say “thank you, Heather,” after every class, write emails with streamlined professionalism, and (almost) always follow instructions. This quarter in my “Medicine in British Popular Culture” seminar course, we’ve committed to loosening that grip on affective constraint. We start class with silly ice-breakers, we welcome deep…
Seinfeld, “The Junior Mint,” and How Medical Knowledge Lands in the Public Sphere
Despite its infamy as a “show about nothing,” Seinfeld’s “Junior Mint” (1993) episode is emphatically about medicine—medical knowledge, the medical world, medical “miracles”. More specifically, it centers on how the ‘general population’ receives medical knowledge. Interwoven subplots caricature the routes through which information about the body’s illnesses and healings pass into what we might call…