Jocelyn Harris Between 27 January and 18 March 1817, Jane Austen wrote her final, unfinished, novel Sanditon, meaning a town built upon sand. This blistering satiric anatomy links hypochondria, property speculation, and consumerism—invalids seek out seaside resorts, property prices rise, and developers cash in on the new health fads of sea air and sea-bathing. In| Corpus
William Green Nearly everyone wants to know the ‘secret’ to longevity. Several years ago, on his 107th birthday, Jack Coe (at that time the oldest man in New Zealand) declared that the secret was ‘popcorn and beer’. Hastings centenarian Vi Cassin, born in 1924, gave her answer as ‘onions and beer’. I would like to […] The post Encounters with Musical Centenarians first appeared on Corpus.| Corpus
Jason Gurney The boot that is held on the throat of Māori and Pacific people is stubbornly resistant to attempts to shift it.’ – Professor Peter Crampton I understood very little about the root causes of bad health before starting work in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago’s Wellington School of […] The post Tangata Tiriti first appeared on Corpus.| Corpus
Katie Brockie Looking at myself in the mirror who is it, Who is that lopsided stranger Washing up and down the shore Patricia Goedicke, from ‘Now Only One of Us Remains’ In 2023, I had a mastectomy. When I left the hospital, I was given a Dacron-stuffed soft fabric oval pad to use as a […] The post Being Asymmetrical first appeared on Corpus.| Corpus
Lucy O’Hagan Early in his memoir Native Son: The writer’s memoir, Witi Ihimaera introduced me to the idea that stories have a whakapapa. I had an image of a story travelling through generations of tellers and listeners, told in different places: a dinner table, a classroom, a wharenui, a road trip or perhaps as a […] The post An invitation into a patient’s garden first appeared on Corpus.| Corpus
Laurence Fearnley When you have treatment for cancer, information sometimes comes to you in a sideways fashion and not from the direction you expect. It didn’t seem weird, then, that it was from a newspaper article that I first learnt about the benefits of physical exercise during and after cancer treatment. The article detailed the […] The post The Wellness Gym first appeared on Corpus.| Corpus
Sue Wootton After three and a half years in hibernation, Corpus is back. We will soon be publishing some fresh posts. The site has remained online since we went into hiatus in March 2021 and still attracts several hundred visitors each month reading the back-posts. We are now under the banner of Otago University Press. […] The post We’re back … first appeared on Corpus.| Corpus
Trish Harris Last month I visited the hospital. Even when the reasons are straightforward, the experience is never without echoes. Frame #1: I am sitting in the café in Wellington Hospital’s atrium. From my table I can see an inner courtyard of tables and chairs and a sculpture of arches and lintel. The sculpture is […] The post In the frame first appeared on Corpus.| Corpus
Jill McIlraith I was eight when I learnt two things: how to tie a reef knot and that I should never sing in public. The right-over-left-and-left-over-right knot sequence had a symmetrical simplicity that stuck with me and was the most useful thing Brownies taught me. Not singing in public was a lesson learnt when another […] The post Covid cat first appeared on Corpus.| Corpus
Rae Varcoe “I’m going to be a nurse” had always been my answer to that perennial childhood question. It seemed to satisfy the questioner and happily deflected any further enquiry. When I was sixteen, five sturdy school friends organised a week’s trip, to a hut on the edge of Diamond Lake in Paradise Valley, near […] The post To Medicine via Paradise first appeared on Corpus.| Corpus
Jocelyn Harris Soon after the war, my intrepid mother Margot Wood (later Ross) set off on the long, dusty journey from Dunedin, in the south of New Zealand's South Island, to the Hokianga, in the far north of the North Island, in her little Ford Anglia car. My father, Captain Win Wood, had died in| Corpus
conversations about medicine and life| Corpus - conversations about medicine and life
Rachel Sayers On 14 September 1975, fifty marchers left Te Hāpua in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand for the 1000 km walk to Parliament Buildings in Wellington. The hīkoi (march) was organised to raise awareness about the catastrophic loss of Māori land rights since colonisation. Led by 79-year-old Dame Whina Cooper, the hīkoi grew| Corpus