It is a glorious record of the way dreams of a startling academic career, aspirations to be the first or the chosen one, and desires to see all of the everyday as a reference to a fairy tale, smash into the pandemic and motherhood. This is the link to the blog https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/columns/happily/
The factors driving the allocation of resources within the medical system is often not obvious or transparent to the outsider, the patient or their family. One area where it is openly acknowledged is in the media coverage of transplant medicine. There it is repeatedly stated that the number of organs donated or supplied is significantly [...]
Being deprived of sleep is not only experienced by the patient as discussed in the last post but also by those working within the hospital. This fourth of a series of short essays or reflections on aspects of what could be understood as forms of violence within the practice of medicine turns to the experience [...]
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. [...]
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cold-trauma-suspended-animation A great article written by Natalie Healey published on the wired.co.uk site, raises some interesting questions starting with the basis of the definition of death, through to possible roles for body cooling in the treatment of trauma particularly when trying to increase the odds of survival for patients who have bleed out half of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The French writer Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy questioned the status quo and in particular the patriarchy by using the form of the fairy tale to both subtly and directly question the accepted male and female behaviors of the time. The link below is to an article from Late Night Live on the ABC discussing the fictionalised reinterpretation [...]
Follow this link to read of an interesting development in the practice of oral history, one of the strongest ways to allow the voice of the participant into the discussion. The author's approach expands the scope of the practice of oral history to one where the language of non verbal communication during the interview is [...]
Working on a Time of Death series is a recurring event in my practice. First occurring in 2010 they circle around to be remade every two to three years. A video work will accompany these still images from Series Three and be overlaid with the sound track of the reading of a fairy-tale Once Upon [...]
