“To Break into Pieces” – Puncturing and Preserving the Feminine Self in Leila Chatti’s Deluge (2020) The medical root “-rrhagia” at the end of a term signifies an urgent and abnormal rupture accompanied by a shocking burst of liquid, as in hemorrhage (blood loss from a damaged vessel), menorrhagia (excessive menstrual bleeding), or metrorrhagia…
Tag: Surgery
Book Review: Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912
“Detachment is not the eternal emotional disposition of the surgical operator.” So concludes Michael Brown in Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912. By reconstructing the history of how emotions informed and often guided surgical decisions, he thoroughly dismantles any notion of the cold hearted surgeon.
The Anesthetic Soundscape
Written in collaboration with Dr. Megan Hunt, an anesthesiology resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The Anesthetic Soundscape Prelude The anesthesiologist approaches the patient’s bedside, introduces herself, and asks, “Have you had surgery before?” She listens to the lively rhythms of the heart and lungs, seeking out quiet clues of any conditions…
Open Heart
By Bennett Kuhn // Open Heart (2019) is an original essay-album composed at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City and on Long Island during May 2019. It is available to stream below via Soundcloud pending its digital release on Astro Nautico in July. Bennett Kuhn – Open Heart (2019) 01 Awash In (0:37)02 A…
Selling Stillbirth, 1569 to Now
Alicia Andrzejewski // In one of my monthly visits to the Folger Shakespeare Library this year, I called up Pierre Boaistuau’s Certaine secrete wonders of nature: containing a descriptio[n] of sundry strange things, seming monstrous in our eyes and iudgement, bicause we are not priuie to the reasons of them (1569). I was looking for…
Review of Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
Livia Arndal Woods Lindsey Fitzharris’s 2017 The Butchering Art is a compelling medical biography of Joseph Lister, pioneer of antiseptic surgical theory and practice. Lister’s work, building on the germ-theories of Louis Pasteur, “Transform[ed] the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine” from a chaotic and deadly battle against seemingly inevitable infections to a more systematic and…
The Role of Health Professionals in Treating Epidemic Violence
Lara Boyle The face of the young man before me is split open, in a line that extends from his chin to upper lip. Blood drips from the bottom corner of once-white, now-saturated gauze, which I hold in place with blue-gloved hands. Here in the emergency room at Harlem Hospital, surgeons bustle around me…