Emily Waples // This month, the CDC published an update to its coronavirus guidelines, acknowledging the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, even at distances greater than now-sacrosanct six-foot radius. The revision was radical only in its belatedness, affirming well-established scientific evidence of aerosol transmission. Occurring on the heels of an April 30 update to the WHO…
Category: Science, Technology and Medicine
Update: “Essential Oils and White Motherhood”
Emilie Egger// In September 2018, I wrote my first piece for Synapsis. My article was about essential oils and constructions of white motherhood, how essential oils are a multifaceted part of the post-feminist discourse that highlights sexual difference and the power of domesticity in producing a white, heterosexual future. I also briefly discussed companies’ focus…
The Hype Around Wonder Drugs, Then and Now
Brent Arehart // Every day, American viewers of television and streaming services alike are targeted by direct-to-consumer ads for pharmaceuticals. We are all too familiar with them. Chances are you already know something about Prozac, Lipitor, and myriads of other drugs even if you can’t recall off the top of your head what they are…
Hope on Trial
Sarah Roth // My parents shared a broad, brown desk in their home office. In the years of my mother’s struggle with ovarian cancer, a foot of papers, envelopes, and printouts were stacked on the desk, documenting clinical trials for which she might be eligible. For a time, the desk, with its thick layer of…
Synthetic Life: Anatomy, Paternity, and Personhood in Star Trek: Picard
Rebecca M. Rosen // What truly constitutes a person—their consciousness or their anatomy? Who determines “real” personhood, and how much does biological human(oid) anatomy have to do with that? Which is all to say, what is a person, and who can call themselves “real”? These are the questions viewers are prompted to address in Star…
COVID-19: Not the Only Game in Town
Brenda Tyrrell // A notion that has been carelessly tossed around since COVID-19 emerged last spring is that it is ‘the worst pandemic in the last century.’ Is it, though? Those making this declaration are most likely thinking of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, when one-third of the world’s population was infected by the H1N1 virus,…
Cutting: Traditions in anatomy and Thanksgiving
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…
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…
