Coffee with a Colleague

Poet, Activist, and Educator Kwoya Fagin Maples, MFA Sarah Berry // This interview series features educators, scholars, artists, and healthcare providers whose work is vital to the growth of the health humanities. On Friday, March 12, I interviewed Ms. Kwoya Fagin Maples, MFA, about her poetry collection Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), her intersectional…

In defense of humoralism

Steve Server // “When you get stressed, all the blood comes out,” she explained. This was one of the explanations I heard from a patient in the OBGYN clinic regarding her ongoing vaginal bleeding, which was likely due to cervical cancer.  She told me that she had been eating flour mixed with water on days…

Flayed Animal Bodies: Cats and Pregnancy from 16th Century—Present

Alicia Andrzejewski // “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”—Douglas Adams In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), Derrida writes of “seeing oneself seen naked under a gaze”—his female cat’s gaze, in particular—“behind which there remains a bottomlessness, at…

Monstrous and Mindful Births: Policing the Pregnant Imagination

Image retrieved from WikiMedia Commons. Aristotle’s Master-Piece, or The Secrets of Generation, was first published in 1684 and quickly became the most popular medical book about “sex and babies” from its publication through the 19th century (Fissell 114). The frontispiece in many editions of this text depicts a black infant and woman covered in hair,…