Tag: pregnancy
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Deliver me from evil…
We take a lot for granted nowadays, don’t we? Our individual life-spans are short, our collective memories only slightly longer; most of us cannot even imagine how things were before the advent of modern medicine, before the recognition of germs as a cause of infections, before Semmelweis, a 19th century Hungarian doctor, realized that deaths…
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Is thought gendered?
There was a time when I thought I actually understood the world, but I wonder if I was just casting my eyes about me from a plinth. I was a gynaecologist in another life, and although I tried to understand the other side, perhaps I was merely looking through a glass darkly. It takes more…
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In fair round belly with good capon lined
Once an obstetrician, always an obstetrician. I am recently retired, admittedly, but I nonetheless carry with me the joys and expectations of those days -everything from a mother’s sudden, relieved smile, to the first cry of her baby as it emerges wet and glistening from her birth canal. No less, the gradual changes in the…
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Thy wish was father to that thought
I’ve been waiting for something like this -expecting it, in fact, although not holding my breath: an exploration of the neurochemistry of fatherhood. I mean, it seemed obvious to me -a man, a father, and also an emeritus obstetrician- obvious that there are changes in many, if not most fathers with the birth of their…
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The Serpent’s Egg
We all see the world through our own experiences, paint it with our own colours, fly our own flags. They seem real to us –unique and even necessary to our identities. As if it’s enough to be simply what we wear; as if we are only what we’ve been taught to show. But sometimes we…
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Unquiet Meals
I suppose Age has blunted me –or at least made me suspicious of fads, curious about recent phenomena that wear the clothes of certainty, vogues that hitchhike on the backs of something else never meant to carry the weight… But one must not be caught rubbing the poor itch of one’s opinion, to paraphrase Shakespeare.…
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The Obstetrical Celibate
Celibacy seems so counterintuitive and aberrant to me that I’m constantly amazed how close to the surface it seems to float. Its etymology comes from a Latin word meaning ‘unmarried’ and that, in turn, is an amalgam of two proto-Indo-European words meaning ‘to live alone’, but its exact definition seems contextually influenced. For example, despite…
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The Mistaken Identity
Communication is a fascinating thing. It enables descriptions of the world in different sounds, different gestures, different expressions. A shrug of indifference in one culture is a greeting in another. A nod can convey a myriad of intentions -context is everything. Only the smile seems a common currency. As a gynaecologist, I am ruled by…
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