Phyllisa Deroze // In the Blood (1999) written by the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has received a myriad of critical acclaim and scholarly criticism. This essay is an excerpt from a larger project that I am working on that aims to expand current discussions about the intersectionality of illness narratives, literary studies, and racialized…
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Social Classification & Psychiatric Nosologies: W.H.R. Rivers an Anthropologist and a Military Psychiatrist
Sanaullah Khan // W.H.R. Rivers — a seminal experimental psychologist and anthropologist — worked both among the patients of shell shock in the First World War and as an anthropologist in the Torres Strait, where he laid the foundations of kinship studies in anthropology. In this article, I argue that Rivers needs to be understood…
Radium Woman: A Brief History of Dr. Helen Chambers and her Novel Cure for Cervix Cancer
Jessica Kirwan // January is almost gone and perhaps few people have given thought to the fact that it is cervical cancer awareness month. Health calendars are hard to follow, after all (don’t even look at the month of September, which asks you to attend to eight cancer types), but coincidentally this month I became…
“Learn Something”: Reflections of a Chronically Ill Graduate Student
Kaitlin Pontzer // When I was I child, I watched movies with my dad. He has always been a lifelong student of films, and he shared these precious experiences with his kids. We sailed with Captain Bligh, sleuthed with Sam Spade, fought the bandit Calavera, searched for gold in the Sierra Madre, and even reached…
Technology, Paranoia, and the Therapeutic Encounter
“This isn’t therapy, what we’ve done. We’ve erased things.” — Heidi Bergman, Homecoming (TV version). Roanne Kantor and Anna Mukamal // This fall I had the pleasure of teaching a course on intersections between disability and technology. In putting together the syllabus, I quickly noticed that one of the most potent sites for this question…
Black Mirror and the Therapies of Distraction
Bojan Srbinovski // “San Junipero,” the fourth episode of the third season of the techno-dystopian television series Black Mirror, opens with a series of distractions. It is the year 1987, and Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” is playing on the radio. Yorkie, one of the episode’s protagonists, walks out onto the street…
Bodies in Stone III
Calloway Scott // In the previous post, I concentrated on the dedication of “anatomical ex-votos” within the healing sanctuaries of the Greek god Asklepios. These more-or-less realistic coroplastic representations of body parts were offered to the god of healing (as well as other divinities like Apollo and Aphrodite) as offerings of thanks for successful cures….
Painful Memories and Memorable Pain
Gabi Schaffzin // The following contains spoilers for Amazon’s Homecoming series. Proceed with caution. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory. This started after I recently finished bingeing on the Amazon series, Homecoming, a quick but worthwhile watch for the psychological-thriller fan in all of us. Briefly, the show, directed by Mr. Robot’s Sam Esmail,…
“Let’s Play!”: The Use of Play Therapy in Child Healthcare
James Belarde// “To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.” -Charlie Chaplin Children are the definition of potential. While having dinner on a first date at a vegetarian restaurant, the conversation turned to my gross undereducation in the field of vegetables and an abhorrent overeducation in the field…
Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation”: Uncanny Neuroscience and the Radical Self-Exam
Lauren Mitchell // Ted Chiang’s short story “Exhalation,” which you can read online here, evokes pleasure alongside mourning. Written from the perspective of a nameless anatomist in a mechanized future, Chiang re-casts the body as an “extraordinary machine,” where air, flesh and blood is replaced by argon, metal and gold.
