Baron Justus von Liebig carved out his name among one of the most influential yet now-forgotten figures in the history of chemistry. A major contributor to the development of fertilizer and its techniques for use, Liebig made an equally indelible mark on the landscape of mass-marketed foodstuffs, with his development of dried milk, his investigations…
Tag: healthcare
Book Review: Inspired and Outraged by Alice Rothchild
“[T]he analyst who points us out from our classmates and announced (disapprovingly)/ You women are taking the place of a productive male…You are here because of your Unresolved Penis Envy” (pp 166-7). These are the attitudes which Dr. Alice Rothchild, obstetrician and gynecologist at Beth Israel Hospital, Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology…
Measuring Humanity in Medicine, One Multiple-choice Question at a Time
The day after the U.S. presidential election, I sat for my hospice and palliative medicine board exam along with a colleague, one of my partners. During one long day, we worked our way through 240 questions over a 10-hour timeframe. During a break, my partner observed: “It’s unsatisfying to test our skills in multiple-choice format.”…
How to Feed the Sick: Hospital Meal and Patient Care in Modern Japan (part II: from the 1950s onward)
How has hospital meal changed in postwar Japan? What do the changes tell us about the hospital-patient relationship and patient care in Japan?
“Edible Panopticons”: Hour-Man, the Pill, and the Superpower of Pharmaceutical Autonomy
Before he was the square-chested, slick-haired icon, Superman was a villain’s pharmaceutical test subject. In their 1933 short story, “The Reign of the Superman,” Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster (who would later create the iconic Clark Kent comics) describe an evil chemist who goes to the bread-line and indiscriminately chooses one of the many “disillusioned…
The Geographic Self
The Communication of Pain In her book The Body in Pain, Scarry discusses the way that pain “shatters language” and threatens to be “unsharable” (4,5). She describes how pain belongs to an internal geography, when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to…
It Takes a Village to Heal the Doctor: How the Humanities Helped Me Reclaim Idealism in Practicing Medicine
On the phone with a close friend I vented about a homeless patient of mine who had a stigmatizing health history and whose documentation overflowed with pejorative language; scanning through the notes as I prepared for my palliative care consultation, I counted “noncompliant” six times in just one paragraph from one specialist. The term “noncompliant,”…
Structural Pain: How the Humanities Help Reveal the “Hidden Figures” in Total Pain
As a palliative care clinician, I spend many moments throughout the week sitting in silence with patients, absorbing stories of discomfort and overwhelm, resisting platitudes, which I know can cause more harm than good. Remaining quiet requires training and discipline. “I always want to fill the space with words,” said a physician assistant student who…
A Few Pages for a Life: Self-Portrait Through A Health Record Booklet
“It overflows with loose pages: medical prescriptions all mixed up, from my teenage to my adult years, from benign afflictions to serious troubles. All of those scattered fragments compose an anxious being. Rashes, panic attacks, chronic diarrhea. Nothing really changes, nothing really ever gets better. With slight variations, the same medication names come up again and again. 2005, 2013, 2021.”
Calories: The measure of nurture
The date was October 28, 1935. The night could have been peaceful and relaxing for 26-year-old Fukuda Katsu living in Tokyo if her husband did not complain about dinner. After quibbling about her cooking of rice, he rebuked Katsu for lack of knowledge: “You are too indifferent about calories.” His words were like a slap…