Friern hospital patients, photos 1890-1910
The editors explain themselves.
When I turned 22, a good friend of mine—also experiencing anxiety over all sorts of things, including intercourse—told me about the so-called sympto-thermal method (or STM) for evaluating fertility throughout the menstrual cycle. In other words, for contraception.
By April 30, 1945, Nazi Germany has all but officially surrendered. The Reich has abandoned its citizens, throwing a contemptuous backward glance before collapsing entirely. Kluge tells the story through a series of fictional vignettes, anecdotes, interviews, and other ephemera.
The tic brings me outside myself—far from being a mere signifier of diagnosis, it explodes into a vast network of phenomena that, rather than being components of my individual psyche, span almost every aspect of my social being.
Wounds of the soul are akin to wounds of the flesh in more than just a metaphorical sense. They heal over slowly, painfully, with a great deal of pus.
In the Middle Ages corruption usually meant something less abstract: the deterioration of physical matter, particularly bodies.
At the British-run pearl fisheries of India and Ceylon, policing divers’ bodies was key to ensuring that a recalcitrant and dangerously mobile labor force was anchored in place. But the body acquired a new salience—as both a threat and a potential site of resistance—in the form of illness and epidemic disease.
A chronic fatigue sufferer charts the history and sociology of fatigue, with an eye to its redemptive possibilities.
The first person to tell me about the power of the positive attitude has been holding compression on a bleeding hole in my breast for more than an hour.
It’s normal, in the ER, to make jokes about your patient’s death. It isn’t normal to make jokes about your own. At least, it wasn’t before.
