October 17th, 2024. Public reading of my latest collection of poems, Permettez-moi de palpiter [Allow Me to Pulsate][3]. Open discussion with the audience. […] Suddenly, in a eureka moment, an elderly man speaks up: “You have Cotard’s syndrome. You must have. All the symptoms you describe match up.” This anecdote – whose significance is, in fact, more than anecdotal – gives me the opportunity to revisit a centuries-old tradition in patriarchal discourse of pathologizing female poets.
Category: History of Medicine
What Happened to Mrs. Taguchi? Reading Medical Pluralism in Imperial Japan
Trigger Warning: This essay discusses attempted suicide. What Happened in the Hallway? The story of “Mrs. Taguchi” had a happy ending. Having attempted suicide by hanging for a third time while an inpatient at the Tokyo Matsuzawa Hospital, an elite psychiatric facility where she received treatment in 1930, the 42-year-old’s symptoms took a sudden turn…
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part I): “American Medicine” and Its Ambition in East Asia (early 20th century)
How was medical exchange intertwined with diplomacy between Japan and the United States in the early 20th century?
Limestone Caves, Concrete Buildings, and the Locating Technology for Edible Nests
The Name of a Bird Just before turning another year older in the summer of 2024, I learned that I had been wrong. What I grew up considering a type of “swallow” is a drastically different kind of bird. Allow me to explain by going back in time. In April 1936, an ornithologist named Canuto…
How to Feed the Sick: Hospital Meal and Patient Care in Modern Japan (part II: from the 1950s onward)
How has hospital meal changed in postwar Japan? What do the changes tell us about the hospital-patient relationship and patient care in Japan?
Leonard Woolf and the caregiver’s point of view
That Virginia Woolf suffered from mental illness throughout her life is well documented, including in her own writings, which depict illness from the patient’s point of view. In the memoirs of her husband, Leonard, we find an account of mental illness from the caregiver’s point of view – the view of someone who is not…
“Enquire it Away”: Conjuring the Matron’s Jury in “The Welkin”
Lucy Kirkwood’s 2020 play The Welkin, which just finished its American premiere run at the Atlantic Theater, uses deliberate echoes of courtroom dramas from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible onward to make a counterintuitive point about medical and postmortem investigation specifically, and about reproductive justice more broadly – sometimes, the point of an investigation is to…
Book Review: I Cannot Control Everything Forever by Emily Bloom
Spidersilk Towards the end of her memoir, I Cannot Control Everything Forever, Emily Bloom evokes the image of a spider as a way to reflect upon the duality of motherhood. Moving from Ovid’s myth of Arachne through Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider sculpture “Mother of All,” Bloom lands on an investigation into how spiders in nature…
The Illuminating Power of Things
I work in a museum that is devoted to the history of healthcare (yes, healthcare, a word deliberately chosen over medicine). As the curator, much of my work is behind the scenes, but I spend a significant chunk of my time interacting with the public and giving tours. It’s a part of the job I…
How to Feed the Sick: Hospital Meal and Patient Care in Modern Japan (part I: till 1950s)
How did hospital meal come into being in modern Japan? Why did it become a compulsory part of patient care at hospitals?