It feels like Fibrion made from Silk is back again.

New exciting paper published 1st June 2021 in eLife. https://elifesciences.org/articles/5877 Abstract Thrombocytopenic disorders have been treated with the Thrombopoietin-receptor agonist Eltrombopag. Patients with the same apparent form of thrombocytopenia may respond differently to the treatment. We describe a miniaturized bone marrow tissue model that provides a screening bioreactor for personalized, pre-treatment response prediction to Eltrombopag [...]

Online Sale of Blood from Recovered Caronavirus Patients

Great segment on Radio National this morning reporting on a whole range of anti-Caronavirus products for sale on the dark web. This includes blood from recovered Caronavirus patients presumably with antibodies to the virus being advertised as a preventative. Link below https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/dark-web-covid/12199816

Blood on Silk: The Violence of Medicine: Part VI Going under the Knife

The World Health Organization[1] defines violence as ‘the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation. Choosing to go under the knife, a slang [...]

Blood on Silk: The Violence of Medicine, Part III Being Deprived of Sleep

Patients often report serious difficulties with sleeping while in hospital and this experience of deprivation is even more profound when the patient is in ICU. While there is evidence for the impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive functioning in ICU patients it is only ‘associated’ with the onset of ICU delirium or intrusive hallucinatory experiences. [...]

Violence in medicine Part II – Using the language of war

The American medical humanities scholar Kathleen Powers questions the notion that the violence within hospitals or within medicine is tempered by metaphor and discretion. Rather, she considers the metaphoric language used in hospitals to be a language of violence, or a language of war. In a 2017 paper she outlined the militaristic and violent frameworks [...]

Blood on Silk: the Violence of Medicine

Fiona Davies, Blood on Silk: The Violence of Medicine I (detail) 2020. Conceptual Background: The American academic Johanna Shapiro in a 2018 essay establishes a framework of types of violence in medicine that ranges from the systemic bureaucratic “organisational violence”, originating from the hospital’s architecture and design, noise levels, access to public transport, and the [...]

Non invasive testing of blood glucose levels.

Video Still, BloodonSilk: Blood Types O +, 2012, 2 mins Frédérique Sunstrum, was recently a gold award winner in the Next Gen category for the Good Design Australia Awards. Her design replaces the needs for Diabetes patients to remove a sample of blood from their body and test it externally for glucose levels with a [...]

Start of the install – Site 1 at the State Silk Museum Tbilisi.

Before the weaving starts and the pattern becomes complicated the strength of a simple black and white stripe carries the day.

The plague and its continuing presence.

From the Sunday Morning Medicine wordpress site roundup of that weeks interesting takes on medical history comes a fantastic article by the staff writer on the Atlantic, Sarah Zhang about the Soviet attempts to eradicate the plague in the twentieth century. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/when-soviets-tried-to-eradicate-the-plague/589570/ It made me think of the amazing work by Amy Chan and Natalie [...]

Images of the Exhibition – Cast a cold eye on life, on death: The Remake: Medicalised Death in ICU online.

online at http://www.fionadavies.com.au videos of the performative lecture will be online by the end of this week