Lauren A. Mitchell// Fair warning: this post contains some spoilers for Ari Aster’s Hereditary, but you should read it anyway.
Category: Uncategorized
The Heart of a Child
Jennifer & April Edwell // February is American Heart Month. The heart is an amazing organ that deserves our fascination and veneration. There it is tirelessly beating inside your chest right now, running on its own electricity, steady and miraculous.
The Indian Mental Healthcare Act 2017: A Challenging Horizon
Amala Poli // In 2017, a new Mental Healthcare Act was passed in India, seeking to address several gaps and problems in the previous act of 1987. While marking a significant moment in Indian history by attempting to prioritize patients’ rights and consent, the new act raises new concerns. Can the status quo be transformed through…
A New History of Hereditary Science: ‘Genetics in the Madhouse’
David Robertson // Aided by the rapid growth of publicly available big data and internet search engines, genealogy tracing has become a hugely popular activity. But its origins are not so technologically glamorous: as historian Theodore Porter puts it, ‘The science of human heredity arose first amid the moans, stench, and unruly despair of mostly…
Wordsworth and ‘The Companionable Leech’
Lesley Thulin // John Stuart Mill famously suggested literature’s therapeutic potential when he declared William Wordsworth’s poetry “a medicine for my state of mind” (Mill 85). According to his Autobiography (1874), Mill read Wordsworth during a bout of “habitual depression” and was immediately cured (86). For Mill, Wordsworth’s poetry expressed “states of feeling, and of…
Animate Skeletons and Living Death: The Art of Vesalius’s Anatomical Science
Claire Litt // Medical sciences study the corporeal aspect of human existence. Since our species’s emergence as anatomically modern humans in the Middle Paleolithic era, we have shared an experiential knowledge of what it feels like to have the body of a Homo sapien as the sensual medium between the physical world and our inner lives….
After diagnosis: releasing cdr_ (2013-2019)
Bennett Kuhn // Artist Alfred Darlington (p.k.a. Daedelus) recently tweeted What’s that thing you are still working on, that could already be considered done, but you haven’t quit on trying to perfect it, even though there is no standard to compare it against; remaining undone and no end in sight? I encountered Alfred’s words at…
The Cult of the Invalid: Early Modern Origins
Sneha Mantri // Between the late seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century, Europe canonized a new scientific order, based on experimentation and logic rather than the empiricism and introspection that characterized traditional analytical thought since Aristotle. This dramatic paradigm shift, now well established as the scientific method, led to astonishing leaps of knowledge. For…
Health-Seeking, Stoicism, and Illness Behavior in Men’s Health
“Well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.” – Zeno Chuka Nestor Emezue // While the concept of masculinity is socially conferred, its assumed philosophical attribute–stoicism–remains a personalized and guiding ideology practiced by stoical adherents (male and female) – either by omission or commission. My research looks at the foundational causes of…
“They Are No Respectors of Identity”: Medical Cadaver Dissection, Power, and Inequality in the United States
John A. Carranza // Western biomedical education has relied on the dissection of human bodies to learn of the intricate processes that make us function. Galen and Andreas Vesalius provided the foundation for examining the body in medical education, and the practice has persisted to today despite the increasing use of technology to replace human…
