In the fifth of a series of papers, Alan Bleakley and Rob Marshall
The status quo in Mid-Staffordshire was one of poor care, high mortality rates and widespread patient concern, compounded by managerial and clinical inaction. Appalling care had, quite literally, become habitual and taken-for-granted. As the inquiry report makes clear, there were many warning signs, but because of "an engrained culture of tolerance of poor standards, a focus on finance and targets, denial of concerns, and an isolation from practice...]]>
Inconclusive diagnosis
Stole conclusive identity
The experts only know what they see
Not what it means
Mass pressing on spinal cord
I give her the only thing I can
Knowledge
See that? It's your T5 to T6 vertebrae
And there? That's the back of your ribs
The steroids you're taking will help and hurt
Wheelchair bound
physical therapy mornings turn into
pain patched nights
Stretches and weights and stamina because
Hope is a muscle that can atrophy
Without use
Leg spasms, medicines with careful instructions
Eat this one before you eat
That that one two hours later
Take these three throughout the day
More time with family
Everybody suffers
Still a mother
Now we take care of her instead
There's a fine line between a tragedy and a blessing, she tells me
I should know what to do
Should know how to treat her illness
...]]>Portraits are ubiquitous in medicine. The Patients' Portraits group of companion papers in Medical Humanities indicates the richness of the materials and the value of...]]>
Please don't ask me to leave;
Don't make me wait outside while you do
All the things that you're trained to do
That will bring her back from the brink of death.
Let me hold her hand a little longer; I won't be in the way at all; Just quietly, quietly, I'll sit, eyes closed, Willing life back into her ravaged body.
Please don't ask me to leave just yet; She needs to feel that I'm still there; That I'm fighting for her every inch of the way; She won't be so scared with her hand in mine.
What if she opens her eyes perchance? If her heart starts beating again like before? How will she feel amongst masked strangers? Please let me be there; don't make me go.
When she was born, I still remember One of the very first things that the little...]]>
Medical student: 4:45 I know, I know, you're the medical student. Yes my dear, you can listen to my lungs. No, I don't have any chest pain or shortness of breath. Sure, you can do a neurologic exam... even though the surgery was on my bladder.
Intern: 5:15 Papers shuffle. The list! Don't drop the beloved list! Yes, I walked yesterday... three times. No, no gas yet. Yes that hurts... I just had surgery.
Rounds: 6:10 Chief resident shuffles in, looks like he's in high school. Residents look tired; time to wash that white coat pal. Then the intern, the trusty medical student. Intern is making check boxes; that's cute....]]>
though the drugs were getting better all the time,
and more expensive.
We blamed ourselves while exotic named potions
dripped through hopeful arms,
meanwhile the oceans were drained of normal saline.
"Your chances of death are small, say 0.9 percent,"
I told Bed 5, but it wasn't good enough,
she was alive then dead the next day, only the flowers
by her bedside knew why. They kept dying,
the drugs failed, I failed, words failed
to explain to them the way the universe worked.
‘Sorry’ said a thousand times until we developed a lisp,
so we turned to magic, the laying on of hands,
late at night we spoke to the dead, listened for breath sounds,
peering into a cavernous pupil we whispered the poetry of Keats,
counted to ten, lifted the sheet.
At midnight another loss,
advanced resuscitation failed...]]>
By way of a comparison with other portraits of the artist from around the same period, I interpret Chesham Street as a patient self-portrait, which reveals the artist's dual personalities of bohemian artist and Australian boxer: two personae that did not combine seamlessly, as revealed by the composite nature of the patient in Chesham Street. From a discussion of the artist as patient, I move to an analysis of other self-portraits by Lambert in which the artist is shown flexing his muscles, especially in the context of his passion for boxing. I consider how these portraits serve as complex inscriptions of illness and health and how this relates to the experience of living and working as an Australian expatriate artist in London in the early twentieth century.
]]>In this article, we tackle the complex theme of ‘translation’. We use the lens of translation studies to examine the process of turning the patient's story into medical language. We address the questions: what makes a ‘good’ translation? What are the consequences of mistranslation and poor translation? And, while things are inevitably lost in translation, does this matter?
]]>Come See My Baby In Kitwe
In a cinder-block building Tucked behind the maternity ward Cries rise from rows of metal cribs Like baby sparrows Chirping at dusk as the cobra Slithers toward their orphan nest
Eyes widen as white hands Lift the soiled cloth off a naked frame Baring black bones wrapped in cellophane skin Raw sores and lymph nodes cluster Like hot stones along A small red path
Death coils around the crib Hisses, then plucks out The frail heart Places it on his full cart Pulled down the rows As night falls
None.
Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
With Illness as Narrative, Ann Jurecic seeks to reclaim the validity of illness narratives from the still dominant ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in literary criticism and its allies. That widespread faction, when not ignoring illness narratives entirely, tends to dismiss them for their earnestness, naïveté, subjectivity and affectivity. Illness narratives are pragmatic and not theoretical. Like much life writing, they disregard the social, political and cultural powers that shape discourse, and therefore, they simply fall out of the jurisdiction of legitimate scholarly consideration. Or so the criticisms go. Jurecic does not wish to discount the established critical climate, but to expose its inadequacies, in particular, its neglect of our ordinary motives for writing and reading illness narratives. It is these motives that she thinks must be brought to bear in any serious critical treatment. She looks first at the history of personal accounts of illness, and then devotes...]]>
The author of this collection of fictionalised medical vignettes is a ‘doctor's wife who keeps her ears open.’ Susan Woldenberg Butler managed her husband's medical practice in a small Canadian country town before he ‘slid completely into academia’. She interviewed family doctors around the world, and has produced a slim volume of fly-on-the-wall short stories that highlight current issues and universal themes.
Each chapter is told by a fictionalised doctor. The scene is set in note form at the start of the chapter. The short story is told in the first person, the scene is set, characters introduced, and a medical scenario described. The doctor acts, opines and muses. It's a bit like one of those rural GP programmes they show on telly in the afternoons, but with less sex.
I set out to read this slim book with high hopes and a pleasant sense of expectation....]]>
The eponymous heroine of Barbara is a female paediatric surgeon. The film won an award for director Christian Petzold at the Berlin Film Festival and has had generally good reviews, so I was hoping that it would avoid the usual clichés. But although it was watchable and absorbing, I came away disappointed.
The film is set in preunification East Germany in 1980. Barbara (Nina Hoss) has been banished from a prestigious Berlin hospital to work in a small rural one as punishment for requesting to leave East Germany. We sympathise with her—the scenes of life in the East German countryside are pretty grim and her flat looks like a prison cell. She is kept an eye on by handsome young doctor Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), who has been told to make advances towards her and to report her every movement to the Stasi. Not surprisingly, she takes an...]]>
The film, which was an ‘official selection’ at the Sundance Film Festival in the USA earlier this year, has the tagline ‘Medicine, Monopoly, Malice’ and examines how millions of people in developing nations have been denied access to antiretroviral HIV medications (ARVs) since the advent of the drugs in 1996. Director Gray reveals what he calls a ‘crisis of humanity’, in which trade patents and...]]>
While diagrams and visual aids are often used to help patients understand and remember information, the teaching of visual literacy skills in medical education curricula is still in its infancy. In the context of a wider medical humanistic training programme, Michael Green and Kimberly Myers claim that graphic pathographies (book-length comics about illnesses) can be used to teach medical students observational and interpretive skills.
Using the theoretical writings of Will Eisner
I will show you grief.
Look here.
You want to see?
The open refrigerator door frames the lovers.
Just this way.
Follow me.
We're almost there.
You will stand with me by the side.
You will have to look down—it's private.
But can see from the corner of your eye.
A cold visitation deep in the quiet maze of the hospital basement. Just myself witness. Best man to half an alter-vow fading under caresses. Now you along side.
‘Can I cut a piece of hair?’ she asks, no longer knowing what was hers. Crush hold memento.
‘Of course, or we can take care of that for you’. I would start the case as soon as she finished. An intrusion of strong gloved hands and calculating blades waiting.
The hair was her final quiet request, but the visit had started with a scream. Mrs. Paznyk had seen her husband...]]>