Showing 31 - 40 of 245 annotations tagged with the keyword "Anatomy"

Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Plays

Genre: Essay

Summary:

This is a collection of essays by (mostly British) artists, performers, and academics on the intersection between medicine and theater.  It appears in a series entitled “Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues” put out by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.  The introduction makes it clear there are many points of convergence beyond the scope of this volume, such as how medicine is depicted in plays and therapeutic uses of theater (e.g. drama therapy).  The focus here, then, is on “the ways in which the body is understood, displayed and represented in performance” (p. 11).  And the “medical body” of the title refers to one that is ’acted upon’ by illness or disability and/or by the diagnostic and therapeutic activities of the medical profession” (Ibid).  

The book is divided into three sections: “Performing the Medical,” “Performing Patients,” and “Performing Body Parts.”  The first section includes an essay by Roger Kneebone, a surgeon, who explores the parallels between his field and theatrical performance.  Kneebone has devised simulations that enable laypersons to get a sense of what it is like to participate in surgery.  In his view, this encourages cross-fertilization of ideas.  For example, his collaboration with a jazz pianist has demonstrated to him that musical improvisation, in its spontaneity, is somewhat like emergency surgery.  And his work with a choreographer led to the development of a dance piece depicting the movements of a surgical team during a procedure.   
 

In the second section we read about Brian Lobel, a theater artist who has used his experience with testicular cancer to create a solo performance piece entitled “BALL.”  This not only allowed Lobel to “regain a sense of mastery over the illness experience” (p. 88), but has also earned him a niche within the theater community.  Lobel now works with other cancer sufferers helping them develop their own narratives in a project called “Fun with Cancer Patients.”  

The final section of the book includes a description of “Under Glass,” a forty-minute performance piece consisting of eight specimen jars each containing a solo performer, said to be “at once museum exhibit, gallery and medical laboratory” (p. 141), which also provides the book's front cover image. "Under Glass" was devised by Clod Ensemble, whose Performing Medicine project is known for its teaching programs in numerous London medical schools.  Meant to provoke discourse about the public display of specimens, it brings to mind the Victorian “freak show” as well as the more recent controversial touring Body Worlds exhibition of plastinated cadavers and body parts.

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Dr. Mütter's Marvels

O'Keefe, Cristin

Last Updated: Jan-25-2016
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction — Secondary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Biography

Summary:

Those who are familiar with the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, best known for its anatomical oddities, may have wondered about the institution’s namesake.  The author of this book, a poet and native of Philadelphia, endeavors to place Thomas Dent Mütter within the context of 19th-century American medicine.  

We learn here that notwithstanding being “medicated” with wine, surgical patients emitted such agonized screams that observers were known to vomit and pass out in their seats. We learn that Philadelphia was a cesspool of infectious disease for which there was no effective treatment.  We learn too of the rivalry (including behavior that would be considered unprofessional today) between the well-established school of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Mütter’s alma mater) and upstart Jefferson (whose faculty Mütter would join).  

In an era before the germ theory of disease became widely accepted, there was of course no concept of sterile technique.  To suggest that a surgeon should wash his hands was to imply he was not a gentleman because “all gentlemen were clean” (page 104).  Resistance to anesthesia was based not so much on concerns about potential danger but on the notion, when it came to obstetrics, that pain was a punishment for the sins of Eve.  Doctors could be downright sadistic to their patients, to the point of beating them like livestock.  That there was no concept of surgical aftercare meant that patients would be sent home immediately following an amputation. Victims of grotesque tumors and disfiguring accidents were considered “monsters” who lived lives of unimaginable misery.  

Enter Mütter, whose importation of plastic surgery from Paris to America brought hope to thousands of incurables.  He had an intuitive sense of the role of cleanliness in reducing morbidity and mortality.  He was a passionate advocate for anesthesia when it was seen as little more than a fad.  He abandoned traditional teaching methods that held a professor should be distant and unapproachable, and became beloved by generations of Jefferson students.  
 

In short, Mütter emerges as not just a likeable guy, but the forerunner of a whole new concept of what a good doctor should be, a sort of cross between P.T. Barnum and Mother Teresa.    

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Skin for Ricky

Schiedermayer, David

Last Updated: Dec-10-2015
Annotated by:
Nixon, Lois LaCivita

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The physician-narrator is looking in on a 30 year old patient named Ricky. Readers immediately learn that the patient has cerebral palsy: his ear mashed flat, his neck contorted into a tight C, almost quadriplegic. These first stanza clinical observations are indisputable. The narrator then shifts from the medical facts to more subjective thoughts ranging from Ricky’s previous treatment responses and medications to Ricky’s adult heterosexual response to the proximity of a female, and finally to the narrator’s own wishes for this patient. Ricky’s parents, the narrator notes, have similarly but uncomfortably witnessed their son’s ogling response to a pretty nurse or doctor or a provocative adult television image. The parents’ response, he notes, to these observations has been to redirect Ricky’s focus by switching the channel to Nickelodeon, a program geared towards children.  Not unlike situations in several writings by William Carlos Williams, this physician has moved from objective medical information to his own interior thoughts about Ricky’s circumstances and confinement.  Rather than sticking with the facts associated with the patient’s medical condition, he wonders, imagines, and expresses in this poem seemingly un-doctorly thoughts. 

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Will Starling

Weir, Ian

Last Updated: Oct-16-2015
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In 1816 London, Napoleon has been defeated and troops have returned, including teenaged Will Starling, who survived the wars as assistant to the decent surgeon Alec Comrie. Will now serves Comrie in the city, still in strained circumstances.

Medical science has turned to the utility of anatomy, but material for research and teaching is scarce. Body-snatchers procure subjects from robbing graves—sometimes from murder—but they are not the only bad actors. Flamboyant, privileged Doctor Dionysius Atherton is trying to raise the dead by applying newly harnessed electricity to fresh cadavers.

From this ghoulish world of science and crime, young Will Starling tells his own tale, as your “Wery Umble Narrator.” Vivid scenes of wretched urban poverty, wanton cruelty, and selfless heroism march past to a grim ending.  

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Sleep Talker

Shafer, Audrey

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This fine collection of work by Audrey Shafer is subtitled "Poems by a Doctor/Mother." The book begins with a section containing poems of personal history and experience ("that I call home"), descends into the nether world of anesthesia ("not quite sleep"), and in the final section returns to the light with a new perspective on the texture and occurrences of ordinary life ("okay for re-entry").Among the more medically oriented poems, see especially "Spring," "Anesthesia," "Three Mothers," Monday Morning (see annotation in this database), "Gurney Tears," "Center Stage," and "Reading Leaves." "Don’t Start, Friend" takes up the topic of substance abuse among anesthesiologists (or physicians, in general).

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Anatomy Lesson

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice
Chen, Irene

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry — Secondary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This poem describes how, during the anatomy lesson, the medical student feels curiosity about the wonders of the human body. He is torn between his desire for knowledge and the horror he feels in cutting up a dead body: "the violence of abomination." This marks a transitional point in the student’s medical career path.

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Pathology of Colours

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In this haunting poem, Abse compares the colors found around us to colors found in illness and death. The poem begins prettily, "I know the color rose, and it is lovely," an image which is immediately juxtaposed with a tumor ripening into the same color. Similarly in the same quatrain, another image of nature, "healing greens", is compared with "limbs that fester" of the same color. To emphasize the tension of the similarity and difference, Abse ends the two lines with the same word. However, the nature image is "so springlike," while the illness image is "not springlike."By the second quatrain, the images become more grotesque and frightening, as the colors of "the plum-skin face of a suicide" and the "china white" eyes or figure of a car accident victim are described. In the following quatrain, the tensions mount, as "the criminal, multi-coloured flash / of an H-bomb" is described as "beautiful" and compared to the stunning and glorious image of the mesentery dissected during an autopsy: "cathedral windows never opened."The poem closes with the rainbow, seen not only in the sky, but also in "the bevelled edge of a sunlit mirror," as well as in the striped "soldier's ribbon on a tunic tacked." Life and death, nature and pathology, health and illness are hence all united by common colors; colors which are reflected in that "sunlit mirror."

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The Origin of Music

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The speaker has taken "two small femurs of a baby" from the Pathology Laboratory. He keeps them in his pockets. Whenever someone tells him a tale of grief ("woeful, intimate news"), the speaker takes the femurs from his pockets "and play[s] them like castanets."

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Carnal Knowledge

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-05-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In the first part of this four part poem, the medical student climbs “stone-murky steps” to the Dissecting Room, as London is being bombed during World War II. In the second part, the student asks his cadaver, “Who are you?” Probing deeply, cutting the meat, the student concludes that the cadaver was never really a person, the right hand “never held, surely, another hand in greeting / or tenderness . . . . ” In the next part it becomes clear that because of the student’s flip attitude, he hadn’t been invited by the hospital priest to the memorial service for cadavers.Finally, the speaker (now for many years a physician) reflects again on his old question about the cadaver’s identity. He realizes that the cadaver’s name is the name on every gravestone, that his figure is the figure on every human portrait, “always in disguise.” At the end, the physician goes on with his daily activities, climbing the stairs to his bedroom and winding his clock.

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Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This poem compares the grave robbing done in the 19th century in order to provide cadavers for medical training and research with the modern medical technologies that "rob" the dead of their rest by keeping them alive on machinery. Now the medical profession is "resurrecting" people before they're dead--delaying their deaths with machinery and drugs. "We cheat the dead of dying, with machines instead of spades." This poem also comments on the use of poor people who don't have the power to prevent this kind of denial of their rights.

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