In the preface to his 1588 treatise on surgery, Elizabethan surgeon William Clowes declared to his reader that “mine intent is not to hold my tongue at abuses” (A prooued practise sig. A1r). Thus began a section in which he discussed several stories of medical malpractice.1 In one, he described a “pernicious pill” that had…
Category: Science, Technology and Medicine
Under the Surface
I’ve only seen it a few times. I don’t mean when you pass someone at the grocery store, their head covered in a silk turban, pale skin, no eyebrows. I mean at close range—when it’s beyond repair. The first time was ten years ago, an older Taiwanese woman brought in by her concerned daughter. In…
The Elusiveness of Photography to Convey Animal Suffering During the Early 20th Century
“Facts that need no comment”, states the caption of a series of images that illustrate the chapter on vivisection in a naturist handbook published in 1915 in Montevideo, Uruguay (p. 81). It was an encyclopaedic treatise on vegetarianism and natural medicine that offered theoretical and practical articles and included illustrated instructions for doing gymnastics, taking…
Against Breasts
More than 16,000 mastectomies were performed in England and Wales in 2009-2010, mine among them. Due to the size of the tumor, the surgeon explained, it would not be possible to perform “breast conserving therapy” (BCT)—more often more referred to in the U.S. by the awkward Latinate term lumpectomy, and in the UK as a…
Is this ‘For Us’? Doulas, Medical Racism and De-Potentializing Newborn Screening
It’s the second week of my rotation with a reproductive health advocacy organization. On my desktop, a grid of squares, icons of faces interspersed with actual faces, populate the screen. They are from the east and west coast, and some United States territories. More than half of them are Black or Latinx. Each of them…
On hog plum, healing, and goop cosmetics
A wild forest fruit becomes part of a luxury skincare regimen. What is lost along the way? Hog plum (aka yellow mombin) hails from the tropical forests of Mesoamerica and the West Indies, where people have foraged its sweet fruit and medicinal leaves and bark for hundreds if not thousands of years. They have developed…
Colonial Lit(t)eraria: Topographies of Purity and Pollution on the Bank of the Ganga
Is there a link between the histories of the sanitation of the Hooghly and the formation of a discourse of sanitary womanhood in colonial Calcutta? The river in question, Hooghly or Ganga, was the epitome of pollution for the British while being synonymous with purity for the colonized Hindu. The historian Pratik Chakrabarti makes an…
Abortion in Surreal Times: Obstacles for the Youngest Patients in a Post-Roe World
“Our first patient is 11-years-old.” That’s the first thing I heard when I walked into clinic the last week of June. It was a few days after the Dobbs decision and the beginning of a new era in the U.S.: Roe v. Wade had been overturned—the constitutional right to abortion had been revoked. In California,…
Rice in Bowls
It was the mixed rice again. Four months had passed since the Japanese soldiers of the First Regiment of Imperial Guard first saw such staple in November 1886. Instead of shining white rice, their bowls held some yellowish rice with barley kernels. They heard that soldiers in the Second and Third Regiment had the same…
Toppling the Ladder: The Patriarch’s Foundation and Fantasies of Reproductive Resurrection
Rebecca M. Rosen// What are the requirements for biological personhood? Are biological gestation or unaided longevity necessary preconditions, or optional? Foundation, the Apple TV+ series whose first season aired in the fall of 2021, is one of many recent scripted dramas to explore these question of personhood from the perspective of synthetic and biological beings,…