musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

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  • When beggars die there are no comets seen

    When I was growing up, Death was a word I rarely had to use. I suppose that’s the thing about nuclear families: they sometimes privilege the unit at the expense of others in the kin. Occasionally, a distant relative I had never met succumbed, or there would be a report on the news of casualties…

    gozzter

    March 11, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Andy Owen, closure, Death, Frank Kermode, lives are stories, Pauline Boss, stories, The Sense of an Ending
  • A rarer spirit never did steer humanity

    Okay, here’s a seemingly obvious and probably self-evident question: What constitutes personhood? I mean I assume that, until recently, it was something only bestowed on us -humans, that is- but what, exactly, is a person? And does the reason we were its exclusive possessors have anything to do with the fact that we are the…

    gozzter

    March 4, 2020
    Uncategorized
    boundaries, etymology, legal definitions, masks, Maya, metaphors, naming, OED, Online Etymology Dictionary, personhood, persons, Sarah Jackson, University of Cincinnati
  • Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?

    What have we done? Have we become so transfixed with definitions –differences– we have forgotten where we started? Where we want to go? Has the clarity for which we strived, opacified as it cooled? Sometimes the more encompassing the definition, the less useful it becomes. I suppose that coming from the putative dark side -that…

    gozzter

    February 26, 2020
    Uncategorized
    analytic feminism, continental feminism, definitions, emancipation, Feminism, Georgia Warnke, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Judith Butler, LGBTQIA, MIT, oppression, resignification, Sally Haslanger, Shakespeare, Simone de Beauvoir, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, UC Berkeley, University of California
  • Learned without Opinion…

    Sometimes we are almost too confident, aren’t we? Encouraged by something we’ve just read, and recognizing it as being already on file in our internal library, we congratulate ourselves on the depth and breadth of our scope. Perhaps it’s the title of an abstruse article, and even the picture at the top of the page…

    gozzter

    February 19, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Alaxon, books, choice, deceptive clarity, desirable difficulties, Edge.org, Hermann Hesse, Jacob Burak, knowledge, learning, Magister Ludi (the Glass Bead Game), Marcia Linn, memory, Robert Bjork, Tania Lombrozo, understand, understanding, unintended consequences, University of California
  • Masters of their fates?

    Sentience is the present participle of the Latin verb sentire –‘to feel’- but what is it? What does it imply? Consciousness? Thought? Or merely some form of awareness of the surroundings, however indistinct and vague? Is avoidance of a noxious stimulus enough to establish sentience, or does it have to involve an understanding that it…

    gozzter

    February 11, 2020
    Uncategorized
    avoidance, Backyard Brains, Brandon Keim, cockroaches, cognition, consciousness, Darwin, honeybees, Insects Sociaux, J.B.S. Haldane, Life, Mathieu Lihoreau, Pain, RoboRoach, sentience, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Thomas Nagel, What is it like to be a bat?
  • A thousand times goodnight

    Am I working against the grain? Or is it just that I’m getting older? Unable to assimilate new situations quickly enough to form a useful opinion? I’d rather think of it as the wisdom of Age, but, of course, I would think that, wouldn’t I? And yet, the realization that first impressions are often premature…

    gozzter

    February 5, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Age, Alexander Todorov, attraction, BBC Future, California State University Los Angeles, dating apps, faces, first impressions, friendship, Karen Wu, love, love at first sight, Princeton University, the wisdom of Age, William Park
  • This thing of darkness

    I’m starting to wonder if I was misled during those halcyon days on my father’s knee. It was a time when heroes and villains were easily recognizable -like the white and black hats on the cowboys in the movies that were in vogue then. Apparently, I needed to know who to root for when I…

    gozzter

    January 29, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Catherine Nichols, Cinderella, folk tales, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, good vs evil, Grimm brothers, Icelandic Edda, Maria Tatar, myths, oral traditions, stories, the Iliad
  • Of thinking too precisely on the event

    The right not to know -now there’s an interesting concept in today’s competition for instant news, ‘breaking stories’, and the ever present titillation of factoids. It seems almost counterintuitive -why would anyone choose not to know something? Surely knowledge trumps ignorance. Surely Hamlet’s timeless question ‘Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings…

    gozzter

    January 22, 2020
    Uncategorized
    autonomy, Beneficence, DNA testing, Emily Willingham, ethics, Hamlet, medical research, medicine, the right not to know, UK Biobank
  • More than kin and less than kind

    Am I really the me I think I am -the cogito ergo sum I have been led to believe? Or have I been naïve all these years in assuming my identity rests solely inside somewhere -in the uniqueness of my brain, maybe, or in the peculiarities of my experiences that no one else could ever…

    gozzter

    January 15, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Descartes, landlords, me, Mikhail Bakhtin, rent controls, solitary confinement, tenants, University College Dublin
  • Here’s ado to lock up honesty

    Sometimes I think we want to simplify things too much; we crave bichromality: on or off, yes or no. We want certainty, not a spectrum. An answer, not another question -a decision, in other words. And yet if we stop to look around, it seems obvious that things are seldom black or white -there are…

    gozzter

    January 8, 2020
    Uncategorized
    colours, communication, consent, ethical sex, felicity norms, Georgetown University, intent, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, meaning, negotiation, propriety norms, Rebecca Kukla, relationships, safe words, sexual dialogue, sexual language, sexuality, speech act theory, words
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