Marina Fedosik’s Kinflix examines the “tug of war” over the meaning of characters that trouble assumptions of heterocoital reproduction through the medium of film, which reflects social norms and generates them in its portrayal of non-normative family making. The book is organized by genre: horror, drama, comedy, science fiction. Fedosik argues that, despite transcending the…
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Love Hurts, But Where? A Brief History, from Lovesickness to Limerence
Readers of medieval romance were all too familiar with a common trope of modern romance novels: love is pain. Andreas Capellanus opens his famous twelfth-century treatise on romantic love by calling love “a certain inborn suffering,” a malady most commonly afflicting young noble-born men for whom the sight of (and subsequent meditation upon) his beloved’s…
From Interval to Image: Carson, Mann, and the Art of Clinical Reasoning
In attempting to explain how physicians in my field of geriatric medicine think through clinical cases, I have come to realize over the course of my training that, although the prevailing schemas of clinical reasoning are often presented as algorithmic, the interval between observation and a formal diagnosis feels less like a straightforward thought process…
Angel’s Egg, Morphine, and Spatial Empathy
(Museum of Health Care at Kingston In-Person Doors Open Kingston) I recall teaching Children’s Literature at Queen’s University when a student cross-referenced a scene from Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg with Victorian-era morphine bottles. Students encountered the morphine bottle during a live, in-class presentation led by the Museum of Healthcare in Kingston, Ontario. As we…
Clinical Encounters of the Human Kind: (Re)Visiting Story Structure and Healthcare
“…all of our literary tradition sees evil as having something to do with the inability to see outside ourselves, to see another human being as being real.” –Susan Neville, “Where’s Iago?” A recent article in The New York Times gave me pause, as it reminded me that when it comes to health and healthcare, we…
Between Work and Tear
Between Work and Tear: Cultures of “Kinetic” Work “When workers fell, severing limbs, the pain was acute, but borne. Yet what truly stung was the loneliness and anxiety of falling that weighed on their minds.” – Temporary People [Unnikrishnan 2017] “In the human body, as with capital, the different elements are not exchanged at the…
Wandering in Tandem: or, How many people does it take to construct a self?
Wandering in Tandem: or, How many people does it take to construct a self? The metaphor of the road is writ large upon the discourse of everyday life — we speak of ‘life as a journey,’ the ‘path travelled’, the ‘passage of time,’ choices made at ‘the fork in the road,’ wandering ‘off the beaten…
Book Review: Dysfluent in Fiction by Riley McGuire
When you watch a period drama set in the nineteenth century, how often does a character stutter? Or have a speech impediment? Or not speak at all? In Dysfluent in Fiction: Vocal Disability & Nineteenth-Century Literature, Riley McGuire explores the “literary history of vocal disability in the nineteenth century” through romance novels, children’s literature, detective…
Lies and Goodbyes: Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019)
In an early shot from Lulu Wang’s 2019 film The Farewell, the camera focuses on the movie’s elderly protagonist in what is clearly a medical setting. In Wang’s script, the acting directions state that “Nai Nai sits alone in a hospital gown awaiting her X-ray.” There, “she has a coughing fit.” Although a disconnected arm…
Gut Subjects: Stomach Acid, “Bloodchild”, and the Intimacy of Visceral Learning
In 1822, Doctor William Beaumont helped heal a young man whose accidental gunshot wound left an open fistula in his abdomen. Reaching into the healed wound, Beaumont later performed experiments that would result in groundbreaking research on stomach acid and its digestive functions. In 1984, Octavia Butler published “Bloodchild”, a science fiction short story in…