musingsonwomenshealth.com

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

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  • Sapere audi

    Sapere audi – ‘Dare to know’, as the Roman poet Horace wrote. It was later taken up by famous Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, and it seemed like a suitable rallying cry as I negotiated the years that led from youth to, well, Age. Who could argue that ignorance is preferable to knowledge? That understanding something,…

    gozzter

    April 8, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Daniel Callcut, habituation, Horace, imagination, Immanuel Kant, internet, knowledge, Laura Mulvey, morals, pornography, the unthinkables, virtue
  • Do you play crib?

    I’m afraid I was a user, but long ago, you understand -before I really knew what I was doing. At that age, you have to depend on your parents, I suppose, but we all know what a lottery that is… At any rate, so the story goes, I escaped unscathed when the contraption I was…

    gozzter

    April 1, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Air Crib, B.F. Skinner, carpentry, Christina Szalinski, cribs, Luther Emmett Holt, operant conditioning, Skinner Box, Smithsonian Magazine, Snugli, The Care and Feeding of Children
  • Bad Samaritans?

    I suspect this is an incredibly naïve, not to mention unpopular, opinion, but I suppose in these times of plague, I should be grateful we have borders -fences that keep them out, walls that keep us safe. But I’m not. I’ve always mistrusted borders: I’ve always been suspicious of boundaries that artificialize the denizens of…

    gozzter

    March 25, 2020
    Uncategorized
    borders, boundaries, Charles Crawford, Corona virus, countries, Covid 19, Kahlil Gibran, migrants, Nationalism, nations, pandemic, Peace of Westphalia, refugees, sovereignty, Sykes-Pico agreement, territorial integrity, Thirty Years War, walls, WHO, Xenophobia
  • Mind Trips

    Does your mind ever behave as if you weren’t getting enough fibre in your diet? Does it ever seem to plug up with loge -or whatever the noun form of logy is? Mine does that whenever it doesn’t get sufficient exercise, I find -not enough thinking perhaps. On the other hand, even when I think…

    gozzter

    March 18, 2020
    Uncategorized
    coding, concentration, Jamie Kreiner, medieval monks, memory, mens intentus, Python, University of Georgia
  • 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
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