Calloway Scott // I want to make a case for looking back to the Corpus Hippocraticum—the Hippocratic Corpus—as a valuable site for thinking about the medical humanities and its future. The 60 odd medical treatises which make up the Corpus are really the works of many hands working at different times and places over the course…
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Immigrant Organizing for Care in the Territory of Hawai’i: The Chinese Old Men’s Home
Julia Katz // How do non-citizens lobby the states and societies that exclude them for greater investment in the welfare of their communities? The case of the Chinese in post-annexation Hawai‘i reveals a unique moment in the midst of global Progressive reform when racialized migrants ineligible for citizenship mobilized claims of economic exceptionalism and autonomous care…
From the Dental Parlors: Dentistry and Masculinity in Frank Norris’s “McTeague”
John Carranza // In his introduction to Frank Norris’s turn of the century novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, Eric Solomon poses the question, “Still, a novel about a dentist?”[1] In response to this question, Solomon cites Norris’s desire to have a main character that had not yet been written about. In many ways,…
The Pump Handle, Fire Hydrants, Grapes: Health Care Metaphors in Negative Spaces
Chuka Nestor Emezue // Broad Street. West London. Summer of 1854. Wrought with a bad case of speaking anxieties, and once voted “Orator of the Year” by the Medical Society of London, Dr. John Snow confronts the Medical Council. Failing to sway his medical counterparts about the causal link of Cholera– through a not-so-elaborate fecal-oral…
Translating Medicine: Interview with Harris Solomon, author of Metabolic Living
Roanne Kantor // Q: What does medicine mean to you? How does it relate to your projects (past or current), and the academic position you hold? A: For me, medicine is most meaningful on a several fronts right now, in light of my current ethnographic research in and around casualty (emergency) and trauma wards at…
On Regeneration: The Once and Future Embryo
Mia Florin-Sefton // I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing . . . we require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender – Donna Haraway…
Object Lessons
Travis Lau // While I was in graduate school, the issue of method was at the center of many discussions from reading practices to interdisciplinarity. In fact, a major conference organized by our Gender and Sexuality (“Gen/Sex”) Working Group was on the topic of method. Collectively we asked a number of difficult yet fundamental meta-questions…
Translating Medicine Part III: Interview with Colin Halverson
Roanne Kantor // What does translation mean to you? Can you talk about the way that it shapes your academic project? The process of ‘translation’ figures centrally in my dissertation, “Individualized: An Ethnography of Translation in Genomic Medicine.” This title plays on the metaphorical extension of ‘translation’ in medical jargon, referring to the application of…
An Elegy to Breastfeeding, from Titus Andronicus to Now
Alicia Andrzejewski // I nurse my daughter for the last time. She is fifteen months old. I hear her sharp cry at 6:10, and, as my partner checks his phone, I rush to grab a glass of water and walk through our five-foot hallway to her. She stands in her crib, expectant, and offers her…
Translating Medicine Part II: Sabrina Datoo
Roanne Kantor // RK: To start, what does “medicine” mean, in the context of your work? Can you say a bit about your scholarly project? SD: The words used for medicine in my sources are the Arabic words tibb, and hikmat. The second of these has a broader range of meaning, including ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’….
