Yoshiko Iwai // The three of us go around the table to introduce ourselves, smiling under our masks and glasses, warming up our fresh scrubs. I had never met either of them before or even seen their faces through Zoom. A moment of silence passes. The guy across from me offers to hold the instruction…
Category: Science, Technology and Medicine
Inhaling the field – surgery, smoke, and smells
Renée van der Wiel // Up until that morning I had spent most of my fieldwork in stuffy, linoleum-lined hospital reception areas accompanying women on their clinical treks. We would chat while waiting to hear a “NEXT!” But before concluding my ethnography of a public breast cancer clinic in Johannesburg, I arranged to spend a…
High Yield: High Stakes Testing and the Ambivalent Rigor of Medical Training
Michelle Munyikwa // “This is floridly high yield, so be sure to keep it in the back of your mind.” The podcaster’s voice, now deeply familiar to me, floats into my awareness through my headphones. Poised at the ready, my pen scrawls the factoid he has advised me to etch into my mind. If I…
Diabetes, Music, and Meaning Making
John A. Carranza // “There’s days I wanna close my eyes and never wake up to my numbers high / Just lay there until all I read is low / I’m sick as shit of all these pricks / And everybody’s ignorance…” So goes the refrain to the song “Double Arrows Down” by the punk…
Stepping up to the challenge: Kerala’s response to the coronavirus
Amala Poli // The state of Kerala in India, recognized in 2018 for effectively containing the deadly Nipah virus outbreak, has reported four deaths since the outbreak of the COVID-19, despite a population of 35 million people. Being the state with India’s first reported COVID-positive patient, instead of being the hardest-hit region, Kerala holds the…
Better to Protect than Regret
Better to Protect than Regret: What Syphilis Campaigns Can Teach Us About Combating the Coronavirus Jessica M. E. Kirwan // In 1917, an incurable bacterial disease had infected an estimated 10% of England’s cities.1 It spread through sexual intercourse, then slowly attacked multiple organs of the body until causing a painful death. Little was known…
T in the Time of Coronavirus
Diana Rose Newby // Why has COVID-19 killed more men than women? As the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 continues its global spread, infection patterns and fatality rates have prompted this question both among medical experts and in the popular media. As of late April, data confirmed this disparity in multiple regions of the world: in China,…
Outpacing Death: How Formula 1 Is Dealing with the Covid-19 Crisis
Pauline Picot // Viruses know no borders; nor does Formula 1 – or at least, not until now. The first ever international racing competition was officially launched in 1950 with the British Grand Prix, taking place at the Silverstone circuit. Since then, it has come to be known as a world-wide circus: a glamorous contest…
Prosthesis and Disability in the Age of Superhuman Functionality
Botsa Katara // Prostheses have been known to humanity since antiquity, with their earliest traces found in Ancient Rome and Egypt. But despite their existence for centuries, their evolution has been a slow and steady one. The change from simple wooden limbs to more aesthetically and technologically enhanced versions was the result of the 19th…
Who’s the Goopiest of them all? Pseudo-science and vulnerability in ‘The Goop Lab’
Emily Wheater // Wellness sells us our own optimised self. ‘Optimisation of self’ is the opening mission statement coming from Gwyneth Paltrow at the start of each episode of ‘The Goop Lab.’ The promise of The Goop Lab, which Netflix describes as a documentary series, is that it will show us how to get there….
