The day after the U.S. presidential election, I sat for my hospice and palliative medicine board exam along with a colleague, one of my partners. During one long day, we worked our way through 240 questions over a 10-hour timeframe. During a break, my partner observed: “It’s unsatisfying to test our skills in multiple-choice format.”…
Category: Theory and Practice
The Patient’s Productive Imagination: The Reportability Paradox in Narratives of Contested Illnesses
Contested or invisible illnesses, such as some autoimmune diseases, multi-chemical sensitivity, and chronic Lyme disease, are characterized by the difficulty in identifying biological markers of pathology. These illnesses manifest in symptoms (i.e., subjective, embodied sensations) rather than objective, pathophysiological signs, making them difficult to quantify and verify objectively, according to the expectations of biomedicine (Malterud…
In the Chair, On the Couch: Haircuts and Mental Health
It’s sort of hard to remain current with haircuts as a resident. I usually like to go every six weeks or so to keep my coif from becoming too sheep-dog for clinical medicine. But sometimes, I push it a little longer, with the justification that, “Well, if mustaches are in, so too must other trends…
Black Feminist Healing Arts: A Making of Pedagogy and Praxis
BLACK FEMINIST HEALING ARTS: A MAKING OF PEDAGOGY AND PRAXIS . . . – the inception – It was Summer 2020, at the height of the pandemic, amidst erupting waves of Black grief. And there I was, sittin’ up in my room, preparing to teach my very first university course amidst a global…
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…
Don’t Forget: Notes Toward Totalities
Five times a day, my watch informs me I am going to die. This isn’t the beginning of a thriller—no stalking by some sinister, sentient AI. It’s an experiment with WeCroak, the app purportedly “inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times a day.” Dutifully, WeCroak…
Chiasm: How Seeing and Hearing Speaks of a Planet in Crisis
Source: (Mortillaro) During the worldwide COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, the media disseminated satellite images of disappearing clouds of pollution over countries like China and Italy. The accompanying copy drew on words like “surreal,” “striking” (Mortillaro), as well as “unprecedented” (Hickey). The headlines sensationalized the images. Online media posts implied a connection between the lack of…
The Geographic Self
The Communication of Pain In her book The Body in Pain, Scarry discusses the way that pain “shatters language” and threatens to be “unsharable” (4,5). She describes how pain belongs to an internal geography, when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to…
Beware the Cultural Beatification of Nurses
A few months in to our first year of nurse training at separate hospitals, my friend and I met for lunch. “I’d always assumed that nurses were lovely people,” my friend lamented as we swapped stories on the divisive hierarchy, personal politics and odd behaviour of some of the nurses we had encountered. Our education…
On Citational Justice
In my course rotation, I typically teach my introduction to Health Humanities and Disability Studies, Literature, Medicine, and Culture, at least once a year. Part of the work of the survey is to expose students to the evolving methodologies in these fields, as well as to the multitude of primary texts often understudied or studied…