Nostalgia inflects modern childbirth. When I first became pregnant, back in August 2022, I joined a few Facebook groups dedicated […]
It’s Wonderful How Ice Can Be So Warm
“It is a pleasure to the real lover of nature to give winter all the glory he can.” – Dorothy […]
Fetal Remains, Knowledge, and the Making of Early Modern Monsters
In 1734, scholars at France’s Royal Academy of Medicine encountered something unique: a tiny, nearly perfect replica of a fetus […]
Interview with Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, author of A Woman’s Right to Know: Pregnancy Testing in Twentieth-Century Britain
Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s clearer than ever how far attention-seeking political rhetoric about reproductive rights clashes […]
Precarity and Pregnancy
When I wrote a dissertation about literary pregnancy, I had never been pregnant. By the time I submitted a manuscript […]
Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times Britain in the 1950s
As I watched Call the Midwife, I recalled my own personal memories and relationship with the National Health System (NHS). […]
Meeting Death–Notes from a Living Historical Artifact
I have recently experienced a good deal of (mostly good) healthcare services here in Northern Illinois. For the last three and a half years I have been a patient in and out of various hospitals, undergoing small and large “procedures,” experiencing rehabilitation and a large number of outpatient services. It wasn’t always this way. I am/was a nurse. I was the one giving the care, staying calm in emergencies, answering those difficult questions and doling out reassurance like sandwiches at a picnic. My recent experiences as a patient have brought back a lot of memories and the sudden realization that I am a living, historical artifact. The apprentice-style nurse training I received in Britain in the early 1980s is now defunct and has been replaced by a University degree, higher wages and a level of professionalism even Florence Nightingale could only dream of in 1860 when she established her training school for nurses in London.[1]Britain, the whole world now knows, reveres the National Health Service as a national icon (remember the opening ceremony at the 2012 Olympics in London–dancing nurses in archaic-looking uniforms and nimble-footed doctors prancing around the stadium with their bedded patients?). I think it was watching the NHS tableau that triggered the memory of the time I first met death.
Finding Satisfaction: A Review of Hysteria
Having researched and delivered conference papers on the topic, the medical historian in me danced a little jig when I heard Sony Pictures Classics was releasing a movie called “Hysteria.” I did, however, enter the theater with some reservations. Motion picture portrayals are notorious for being historically inaccurate, and if films are true to history, those not in the field tend to find it a little, well, boring. (That is unless Werner Herzog is narrating it with his dry but inadvertently humorous observations.) Thankfully, the $7.50 spent on a matinee wasn’t a waste at all. Just about anyone- unless you are akin to the Victorian “social purist” Anthony Comstock- can walk away from this movie feeling quite satisfied.