I have been finding comfort in the oceans recently. A livestream of a reef in Honduras plays constantly on my computer, even when lost in a sea of open tabs. I’ve picked up Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist, and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and am enjoying…
Category: Science, Technology and Medicine
The Birth of the Wellness-Industrial Complex: Justus von Liebig’s Extractum carnis as Exemplar
Baron Justus von Liebig carved out his name among one of the most influential yet now-forgotten figures in the history of chemistry. A major contributor to the development of fertilizer and its techniques for use, Liebig made an equally indelible mark on the landscape of mass-marketed foodstuffs, with his development of dried milk, his investigations…
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part III): The “Tokyo Project”
What was the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Tokyo Project”?
Between Work and Tear
Between Work and Tear: Cultures of “Kinetic” Work “When workers fell, severing limbs, the pain was acute, but borne. Yet what truly stung was the loneliness and anxiety of falling that weighed on their minds.” – Temporary People [Unnikrishnan 2017] “In the human body, as with capital, the different elements are not exchanged at the…
“It Sits There, Looking at Me”: Scenes on AI, Star Trek, and Medical Education
Synopsis The author experiences multiple encounters with AI discourse and struggles to make sense of the tension in their body that results. The author makes no argument and finds no answers; the author invites you, Reader, into the mess, where it sits there, looking at us. — Scene 1: At the recent Rhetoric of…
Therapy or Enhancement? Bioethics in Transhumanist Science Fictional Interpretations of the Body
Image Credit: Sanderson, Bill. “The gyri of the thinker’s brain as a maze of choices in biomedical ethics.” Scraperboard drawing, 1997. Wellcome Collection. [Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)] Therapy or Enhancement? Bioethics in Transhumanist Science Fictional Interpretations of the Body Since the Enlightenment, the idea of perpetual progress and the hegemony of rationality have…
Book Review: Liminal Spaces and the Moral Imagination in “Our Long Marvelous Dying” by Anna DeForest
Anna DeForest’s first novel, A History of Present Illness (2022), follows an unnamed medical student through tension-filled classroom and clinical years among more privileged classmates in New York City. DeForest’s follow-up novel seems a segue from the first. Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024) also features an unnamed narrator–one further along in their medical career– seeking…
“She was evidently insane”: Gender and Madness in Victorian Britain
How did Victorians understand and diagnose mental illness? If a person on trial in a nineteenth-century British courtroom was thought to be suffering from “madness,” the court did not necessarily ask a physician to provide an expert opinion or to diagnose the individual. As Joel Peter Eigen explains, doctors were not respected as expert witnesses…
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part II)
How did American medical professionals design and learn from the 1923 Japanese Medical Commission to the United States for the promotion of “American medicine”?
Severing the Academic Mind
Dichen Lachman and Adam Scott in Severance, Season 2, Episode 7 (“Chikhai Bardo”), Streaming on AppleTV+. In the top image, the pre-severed Scouts talk shop while grading papers; in the lower image, Gemma writes thank-you notes in an eternal Christmas scenario. The AppleTV+ show Severance, which explores the lived reality of people who work…