Sasheenie Moodley // We are told that a “good mother” is the trope of a mother who is loving and nurturing (Chess, 1982; Mercer, 1985). She prioritises and protects her infant. This mother has a good relationship with her “happy” infant (Benedek, 1959). It is a good mother’s job to understand her child’s behaviour and…
Category: Gender and Sexuality
The Risks We Take: How to Talk About Risk Today
Dr. Brian J. Troth // Is risky behavior exciting and sexy? If we believe this to be true, then what happens when risk becomes harder to define, harder to pinpoint? In the year 2019, the risk of becoming HIV-positive is more mitigated than ever before thanks to a revolutionary preventative approach called PrEP. Critical regard…
The Edinburgh Seven and the Power of the Popular Press
Jessica Kirwan // This past July, seven women known as the Edinburgh Seven were posthumously awarded bachelor degrees in medicine by the University of Edinburgh, 150 years after they had been allowed to enroll in the medical school but not actually earn degrees. Although the women had garnered some support at the university, and much…
Part II: The Church and Abortion in Counter Reformation Italy
Claire Litt // The first part in this series on women’s sexual and reproductive health in early modern Italy explored the political consequences of women’s pregnancies, and the devastating consequences for noblewomen when they were unable to conceive. However extensively treated the topic of conception was, especially in scholarly medical literature, the topics of contraception…
“Mirror Work” and the Epidemic Imaginary in New Queer Cinema
Jenelle Troxell // In the closing image of Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, Carol White gazes deeply into the mirror, softly voicing the words, “I love you. I really love you. I love you,” as the camera pushes slowly towards her. While the inward tracking promises access to Carol’s interiority and her direct address to…
Parenting in Public, from Passivity to Peace
Mira Assaf Kafantaris and Alicia Andrzejewski Introduction Is the affective experience of public parenting a health concern, a concern for the medical humanities? Certainly, the constant surveillance of parents, mothers in particular, is born out of care and concern for the well-being of children. This surveillance and the interventions/invasions it inspires, however, result in a…
Medicine in the Archive: Exploring Feminism and Nursing
John A. Carranza // Being a historian comes with no better rite of passage than to enter the archive. Regardless of the time period or topic chosen by the researcher, sorting through the documents is exciting for me because I am able to engage in an imaginative and interpretative exercise where I consider why a…
In reproductive health care, experience frames more rigorous academic questions
Emilie Egger // “Is it anti-feminist to question the Pill?,” asks writer Anna Silman in her June article in The Cut. In her discussion of the birth-control pill and its side effects, Silman chronicles rising concerns among people who take hormonal birth control. In a piece released the same week in The New York Times,…
Recording Women’s Contributions to the History of Victorian Health and Wellness
Jessica Kirwan // I recently interviewed Dr. Lesa Scholl, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, which is soon to be published by Palgrave Macmillan for their Major Reference Works portfolio. Dr. Scholl is Head of Kathleen Lumley College at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Readers of Synapsis will be interested to know…
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…