My earliest days in healthcare were at abortion clinics. First as a counselor and then as a nurse, I cared for hundreds of patients seeking abortion care. At clinics, I learned how to perform ultrasounds with the screen angled away from my patient; I learned how to tell which patients would be relieved in the… Read more →
Tag: Art
Woman in Focus: Jessie Tarbox Beals
Had she never laid her eyes on a camera, Jessie Tarbox Beals might have made a life as a teacher. In 1887, at the age of seventeen, she had just moved from her home of Ontario, Canada to pursue a teaching job in Williamsburg, Massachusetts.1 The daughter of a successful sewing machine manufacturer who had… Read more →
Art as a Tonic: Making Pottery and Defeating Tuberculosis at the Arequipa Sanatorium
In the spring of 1913 journalist Elise Roorbach was walking around downtown San Francisco when she passed a gift store. She saw some unusual vases in the window and went into the shop to look. They weren’t finely formed, and they didn’t have shiny glazes in pretty colors. Some were rather crude, with drip marks… Read more →
¡Viva the Queer Zapata! The Sexual Politics of Defining Mexican Identity and Icons in Fabián Cháirez’s “La Revolución”
Fabián Cháirez’s painting “La Revolución,” part of the current exhibition, “Emiliano. Zapata después de Zapata” in Mexico City’s Bellas Artes Museum, has provoked controversy in Mexico. It portrays Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919), the archetypal, hyper-macho Mexican revolutionary, as a voluptuous, pouty-lipped pin-up girl wearing a pink sombrero, pistol-shaped stilettos, and a ribbon of green, white, and… Read more →
Becoming Rodin’s Lover: Camille Claudel and Mental Illness
“Why have there been no great women artists?” feminist art historian Linda Nochlin asked in her 1971 essay of the same title. She explained that, while there have absolutely been women artists of skill, character, and genius, they have struggled against the social and institutional frameworks that encouraged their male counterparts. One of these women,… Read more →
Witness to Pain: The Migraine Art Collection
“Good morning Katherine, I just wanted to let you know that we have located the Migraine Art.” For four years, as I worked on the history of migraine, I had periodically been in touch with the team at Migraine Action, a UK-based advocacy charity for people with migraine.1 Globally, migraine affects around one in seven… Read more →
“Welcome to the Archive”
Before Nursing Clio takes its annual December break, our editors decided to leave NC readers with a small holiday gift. Please enjoy this delightful archive parody of “Welcome to the Jungle” by AcaSheMia. AcaSheMia is a feminist musical collective made up of faculty from the English Department at North Dakota State University. Originally conceived and… Read more →
Gays in Space: How an Archive of Star Wars Fanzines Helped this Queer Woman Live Her Best Life
In 2016, I drove nine hours from Tennessee to Iowa during my spring break to research homoerotic Star Wars fanzines from the 1970s–1990s. “But why?” asked many of my peers. Well, I went through a bit of a crisis in the last months of my master’s program. Not knowing whether I would ever be in… Read more →
Reframing the Pregnancy Story: On Literature, Stitching, and Lost Narratives
My Story When I found out I was pregnant on July 1, 2016, I thought it was the beginning of a story to which I knew the ending. My partner, Carter, and I had only just decided to try to become pregnant. It was our first attempt and it was a success! What a wonderful,… Read more →
Creating Battle Signs: Iraq/Afghanistan War Veterans, Art Therapy, and Rehabilitation
During my first research trip to the National Archives in College Park I stayed with my family in Lorton, Virginia just outside Washington, D.C. Every morning I drove past Fort Belvoir, a large and seemingly endless military base with its own school system and stores, and wondered what the inner workings were like. All I… Read more →