Donbass, 2014 - a nurse temporarily holds an AK-74 as she assists a wounded pro-Russian militant out of a Soviet-era Lada car in front of a hospital in the war torn city of Slovyansk, Donetsk Oblast.
Today jobs in the medical field are among America’s highest paid occupations. Not so in the 19th century. Not only was it a low-paying profession but it often garnered little popular respect (those leeches may have had something to do with it). Things got so desperate for one Victorian doctor that he took to robbing stagecoaches to make ends meet!
How can you be a force of good in this world… #kidprodigy #bornleader #Fashionkids #kidsrock #kidsfashion #fashionblogger #kidsmodel #cutekids #entrepreneur #kidblogger#graffiti #omag #kidbusiness #mogul #doctors #richkid #sharktank #beastmode #success#nerds #parentingmagazine #smartiscool #grind #kidsblogger #nurse #bosswomen #asoverbaes #blacksheep #millionaire
The kitten gets regular checkups and we’re working on his vaccinations
The birds get regular checkups
This human however has not been to a doctor since she stopped needing the mandatory physical exam for high school sports like 7 years ago because I hate going to the doctor haha
In the hospital, some consultants are very pleasant to work with. Others are decidedly not. But my gripe is this: It’s really easy being nice, and it takes effort to be mean. If one has to do a job anyway, why be rude at all?
I wanted to capture my feelings as a doctor in training who has been bludgeoned by the Covid-19 pandemic the last year and a half. But I’ve been too burned out to write about burnout.”
This article captures the emotions that have kept me from trying to write anything substantial about the pandemic, the massive systemic failures involved, and the social selfishness/ignorance it has revealed.
Teenager patient: So how long does it take to become a doctor?
Cranquis: Well, after college, there’s 4 years of medical school, then depending on your specialty, you have anywhere from 3 to 10+ years of residency.
TP: Oh wow. So how much longer is it for you?
Cranquis: I… I’m already a doctor, and have been for 15 years.
Seeing as this blog is still a baby and only just starting out, I’m gonna need all the suggestions for quotes I can get. If possible, I would be more than happy to welcome out of context quotes in my ask box, preferably with the episode title so I can make the graphic. It doesn’t matter what show it is, as long as it’s on BBC.
All suggestions for quotes will be appreciated, especially while I’m just starting up, but I hope you enjoy your stay and let the inappropriateness commence!
So I ran out of antidepressants/anxiety tablets a week ago and it feels like i’m awake for the first time in months, but I have however noticed that I have been struggling to sleep again and I am getting worked up about the silliest of things again. I’m unsure what to do, should I go back to the doctors or stay of them as I actually feel awake and not like some zombie that is just passing through the motions in life, so far luckily I haven’t had any major downers which is a plus but it will probley happen at some point Just really unsure on what to do.
Hey everyone! I’ve not been updating as much lately because there hasn’t been a whole lot that’s new.
Last weekend, I did my second Gutsy Walk for Crohn’s and Colitis Canada! I again made it to Top Pledge Earner status thanks to my generous friends and family, so I guess that’s gonna be my benchmark every year
This week and next, I have three appointments. I saw my family doctor today for a skin check, and he doesn’t like the look of a new mole that popped up on my fourth toe (of all places), so I’m being referred to a dermatologist to likely have it excised. Kinda scary, but I’d also rather be safe about it. So, I guess I’m now adding dermatologist to my collection of doctors, ha ha! (Seriously, I have a GP, GI, rheumatologist, ENT, gynaecological oncologist, endodontist, and I’ve also seen an infectious disease specialist in the past )
Next up is my GI on Thursday, and there’s going to be a lot to discuss. As mentioned, I’m not confident that humira is still as effective as in the past, and I’ve had some odd things going on. The random hive issue, perianal problems, and hair loss that’s returned. I’ve also had major fatigue for the past month, and increased frequency. I’m sure there will be labs ordered, and probably a scope as well. My husband and I are also (we think) FINALLY going to start TTC in the next few months. I want to make sure I have my ducks in a row before we start the process.
Monday next week I have what is hopefully my last repeat pap after my abnormal result and the colposcopy that followed. If it’s all clear, I’m good to go for only having annual paps again! Yay!
So much happening, I’m tired just thinking about it.
“at some point we should probably have a conversation about how the normalization and glorification of physical exhaustion during medical training contributes to producing deeply ableist doctors.
Like a) it makes the field completely inaccessible to many disabled people whose knowledge is deeply needed there and b) it supports a deeply f*cked up worldview in which pain and fatigue are things you can and should "just push through”
Holy Child of Atocha, thank you for your favours. It happened so that I got pregnant. I didn’t want another baby because I already have two. I told about this to my friend and she gave me a tea which was very effective according to her. After drinking it, I felt very sick for two days and I vomited right on the street. I went to a doctor, and he told me that I got poisoning. They immediately gave me an enema, and I got better. When the baby was born, he was very healthy by a miracle. I really didn’t want more children. I ask the Holy Child for forgiveness because I didn’t know who is the father and that’s why I wanted to abort the baby. I’m very sorry.
So, friends, it’s been a while. This is going to be a quick post to celebrate the amazing lady pictured above, a Victorian trailblazer whom you may not have heard of before but definitely should remember from now on.
Sophia Jex-Blake, quite apart from having one of the sickest Victorian names I’ve ever come across, was the leader of the ‘Edinburgh Seven’ (the others were Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson, and Emily Bovell). These seven women petitioned the University of Edinburgh to allow them to matriculate [i.e., to become students on a course for a degree] in medicine. At first, the uni told Jex-Blake – who initially sought to take the entrance exam alone, before enlisting the help of the others – it would be too expensive and disruptive to have to set up lessons, exams, surgery theaters, etc., for just one woman. Obviously this was an excuse to exlude Jex-Blake because of her gender, which the medical establishment deemed too sensitive and too distracting to allow into their halls. Jex-Blake called their BS, publicly calling for like-minded women via posts in The Scotsmannewspaper and thus gathering together six fellow women. The Edinburgh Seven thus studied up for the matriculation exam. As the Wiki report notes:
Of the 152 candidates who sat the exam on 19 October 1869, five were women. Four of the women came in the top seven places. [x]
By18 November 1870, they were in.
Except, as Virginia Woolf can tell you, getting “in” isn’t the end of the struggle. Once Jex-Blake et al. had joined the program, pushback from the male-dominated students, teaching assistants, professors, and physicians made attending classes – even gettingto lectures – incredibly difficult. Not only did the university charge the womenhigher tuition fees (for the inconvenience of being women and thus necessitatingseparate courses!), but also offered them fewer scholarship opportunities to pay for their coursework. More violent reactions came from classmates and TAs:
Sophia later wrote that it was “as if a conspiracy had been formed to make our position as uncomfortable as might be”. She catalogued the abuse: her doorbell was “wrenched off” and her nameplate damaged five times; a Catherine wheel was attached to her door; smoke was blown in their faces;filthy letters were sent; they were waylaid in quiet streets; obscenities were shouted at them in public.
Edith Pechey, in a letter to the Scotsman, also spoke of being followed in the streets and having “the foulest epithets”, such as “whore”, shouted at her. [x]
Eventually, after an actual “Servants’ Hall riot” about their attendance, the Seven got near the end of their degrees, only for the university to rule in 1873 that the women were to be rejected of their degrees and dismissed.
After that, each of the Seven decided to pursue her medical career elsewhere. Jex-Blake went to Switzerland to finish her training, then eventually – in 1877 – was recognized in Ireland (still then unified and part of the UK) as a doctor. Thus she was eligible to practice in Britain at last.
But she didn’t just go back to any old major or country hospital. Instead, Jex-Blake(at first with Pechey and other comrades from the Edinburgh fight) founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine FOR WOMEN in 1886! For six years, their school continued to be the only one that fully admitted female students in the discipline of medicine; according to the history of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, “During the twelve years of the School’s existence,at least 80 students started courses of whom 33 completed their training there; [and] 31 completed their training elsewhere” (x). Nor were these just the same middle-class white women who had stormed the Uni of Edinburgh the previous decade:
At the start of the summer term 1888, Annie Wardlaw Jaganndham, a Hindu woman, came to Edinburgh to continue her medical studies. She was soon joined by Annie Wells, who had studied for the Certificate of Medical Practitioner at Madras University and the Grant Duff Gosha Hospital. Dr Jaganndham was the first of many newly qualified doctors to become resident medical officer in the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children, to be followed by other newly qualified young doctors in that position. Other doctors who had studied at the School served in more senior posts in the hospital.
After the two women from India graduated, Dr Jex-Blake wrote a second article which was published in The Spectator in 1890. She again stressed the need for women doctors in India. Her plea was answered by Mr James Cropper who instituted a scholarship for that purpose. The first recipient was Rose Govindurajulu who had taken some medical classes in Madras and been given study leave from her post in the Mysore Hospital. Having qualified, she returned to Mysore to become Assistant Physician and later Surgeon in the Mahareenee’s Hospital. (x)
Now, any fair history of Jex-Blake has to acknowledge her reputation – especially among the women with whom she had begun this fight, and who had been the first teachers at the Edinburgh School – as “brilliant, hot-tempered, and resourceful”in a more generous light; in a more unforgiving one, for being a tenacious tyrant. Eventually, disagreements between Jex-Blake and several of her female colleagues led them to part ways, with the Cadells setting up their own school for women in Edinburgh.
In 1894, though, these schools become moot: the University of Edinburgh finally saw the light, and began admitting women for the Faculty of Medicine. (Their tuition still wasn’t covered, and they still for a while had to attend separate lectures from the male students.) Jex-Blake’s and the others’ newer schools were no longer needed, and since they had been a financial and personal burden on Jex-Blake and the other founders from day one, the ESMW closed in 1898.
More happily, Jex-Blake lived the rest of her life with her companion, Dr. Margaret Todd, a younger woman who had graduated from Jex-Blake’s school in 1894! Not only was Todd a minorly successful novelist, but she also is credited with coining the term “ISOTOPE” (!!!), when discussing with friend and chemist Frederick Soddy his work on, well, isotopes. Soddy went on to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry (in 1921, for this very work); Todd went (obviously) unrecognized for years. She died in 1918, at age 58, after completing a detailed work on Jex-Blake’s life.
Jex-Blake herself died in 1912, age 71. As the Edinburgh alumna page dedicated to her notes, she “continued to campaign for women’s suffrage” both in Britain and in the larger empire “until her death” (x).
When you ask a fellow spoonie how to get your doctor to send you for an upright MRI because of concerning symptoms that are being ignored (asked because this person has my condition, has had an upright MRI, and subsequent spinal fusion because the upright finally showed the full picture), and they say you shouldn’t dictate your care and should trust your doctors and just let them steer your care If I do that, I will literally get no care. My doctors do the bare minimum, and aren’t interested in trying to look deeper to find out why I feel like shit constantly. And I see people in my position all the time.
No hate to those of you with good insurance, good doctors, and an actual treatment plan prescribed by your doc, but some of us have doctors that ignore symptoms, don’t bother to even read your records, and generally treat you like a fraud. I have been have severe migraines with neck pain and pressure in the base of my skull like you would not believe (and then my fucking eye started protruding during one), and my supine MRI showed nothing, likely because, as many zebras know, supine MRIs can hide instability.
FIGHT FOR THE TESTS YOU NEED. if your doctors aren’t listening, but you can’t just pick up and find another doctor, ADVOCATE for yourself, don’t let them tell you that your concerns are invalid, and DON’T let them ignore your symptoms. Doctors don’t know everything, as much as they want you to think they do. I had a doctor, who had practiced for like 20 years, tell me that EDS was treated with steroids. This man clearly A. Hadn’t bothered to look over any of my paperwork, because I specifically stated my condition and that steroids were not good for people like me and B. Clearly hadn’t continued his education since his med school graduation. If high school teachers have to do continued education, doctors can read some fucking updated studies.
DOCTORS WORK FOR YOU. You pay them, sometimes hundreds of doctors if your specialist doesn’t take insurance like mine, because they are supposed to do everything they can to find out what’s wrong. If they ignore it, yell about it. I know I fucking will.
My mom is suddenly mad about “having” to go to my GI appointment tomorrow? She always wants to come to my appointments, plus it’s better to have someone with you, especially being a young woman. And this is the first time ever going to this doctor/ practice.
Also, she wants to make me take an uber to the doctor so she can go out with her boyfriend. How fucking childish.
My previous post almost got deleted, but I ended up taking out the mature one then appealing to it. Luckily my appeal got accepted and added back the mature content. Smart isn’t it? :D
As I’ve noted several times, I generally try to ignore whatever is currently passing for ‘governance’ in America at the moment, cuz I just ain’t got the patience, or ability to do all that emotional labour. However, they will keep on doing things that call back to the medieval period, so we’re gonna have to talk about it.
So currently in America, which is defo a first world country and for sure very prosperous and a good place to live, there is some debate about whether or not sick people should be driven into bankruptcy, given the audacity of their instance on being ill. (Have they tried not getting ill? IDK.)
Some Americans, who are for sure good Christians and well into Jesus, need you to know that no one should be obligated to help sick people pay for medical care. To whit:
How charming.
This idea – that health care is something that requires a) payment, and b) is an individual, not a community, concern is what we’re going to talk about today.
Now, as you may be aware, European medicine was underpinned by the idea of humorism which was central to Hippocratic medicine. Hippocratic medicine itself was developed from the tradition of Greek natural philosophy. Hippocrates, obviously, gave his name to the discipline, but the Hippocratic Corpus – a series of sixty some essays on medicine – was developed by several authors and compiled around 250 BCE. Galen then came along sometime around 129 AD and updated the ideas slightly, and notably had some influence on theories of anatomy and pharmacology, but was still a stan for humor theory.
As the theory went – the body held four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. These humors, in turn corresponded to the four seasons, the four elements, four temperaments, and four stages of the life cycle like so…
More or less, the idea was that if your humours were balanced you would remain healthy. If something got out of whack, you got sick. To get better you needed to get those humors back into balance. A lot of this idea was based on observation. If you were so sick to your stomach you were vomiting bile it sure did look like you had too much and your body was trying to rid itself of it. Bad cold? Same thing with phlegm.
Medieval medicine took this classical basis and ran with it. Classical medical texts were copied and edited in monasteries and monks also wrote their own works on herbal medicine and botany based off their own observations. As groups of devout Christian men with access to medical knowledge, monks considered it to be their religious obligation to provide medical care for members of their communities.
As a result, most monasteries ended up having a sort of informal hospital. Because they were actual fucking Christians.
There were a lot of other groups practicing medicine in the medieval period however. Barber surgeons, famously, did a lot of medical work that involved cutting people. Basically if you were able to keep a razor sharp enough to shave someone, odds were it was sharp enough to do minor surgery. Homeboys would do stuff like blood letting, dentistry, looking after soldiers during and after battle, and also keeping your cut fresh AF.
Barbers were medical professionals and for sure got paid. However, the medical services they provided were generally in reach of your average (read: peasant) medieval person.
There was also something for the ladiez to do medically – that is look after other ladiez. (Did you know that half of all people in the medieval period were actually women? No for real. I’m serious.) Midwifery was some real shit, and basically one of very few professional options for individual women at the time. (Fuck yeah the other option was sex work – shout out to my girls.)
Midwives were typically apprenticed at a young age in order to learn the trade, and had to have a reference from their parish priest as to their good character in order to do so. They then learned all about assisting the labour process. Labour was an exclusively female medical event – with men being excluded from the birth chamber. Midwives were certainly professionals, but the great majority of people (again, peasants) could still afford their services.
There were also straight up apothecaries who were sort of like modern day chemists/pharmacists who made drugs and medicines. By the thirteenth century they had their own guilds, and they often worked alongside other medical practitioners in order to establish what drugs should be made or
There were, of course, also dedicated physicians in the medieval period. There were several schools that taught medicine, including the much-celebrated Salerno, and later Montpellier, which is still in operation.
These institutions trained doctors including the famous Rogerius who wrote a killer book called The Practice of Surgery (Practica Chirurgiae) round about 1180, and also came up with the term ‘lupus’ and Giles de Corbeil who wrote a series of influential medical poems on the urinary tract and pulsology. The university system was making some pretty good advances in medicine, if slowly. People started doing more work with human dissection and learned more about anatomy. (Fun fact – high medieval Europe did not totally ban human dissection, but Pagan Rome did. Bring that up when people say the medieval period was backwards.)
The medical schools were drivers of medical thought and research and the people who trained in them often ended up working for the elite. You had to go to school for years to be licensed, and it wasn’t cheap, so you charged.
That’s where the trouble started.
After the Black Death showed up, people were not too enthused about medical practitioners. If they knew so much, why couldn’t they stop the plague?
People began cracking down on non-licensed medical practitioners. If these people were actually skilled in terms of medicine then for real, why TF was everyone dying on the regular? Soon laws began to propagate stating that only licensed, i.e. university educated physicians could practice medicine. This fucked shit up.
Suddenly a lot of people who had been offering health care services couldn’t. The barber who pulled out your rotten teeth? Not licensed. Apothecaries who knew everything about how to create drugs? Part of a guild that learned through apprenticeship, not university. The monks who had killer medical libraries, actual running hospitals, and gardens full of medicinal herbs at their disposal? Only educated in the cloister.
It was even worse for women who could not go to university. In the medieval period all students had to take holy orders in order to join university, meaning that they were clergy members, if only for their time in school. Women couldn’t do that. That meant that there was no legal way for midwives to practice, despite the fact that only women were supposed to be involved in the birth of children.
So the ranks of people who could legally provide medical care suddenly dropped. Meanwhile, the only people who could legally provide it needed to see that cash money in order to provide medical care because they made a huge investment of time and money to get where they were.
In some instances, where you lived also determined whether or not you could get medical care. A trained physician would want to stay where the greatest number of potential (wealthy) clients lived. They, therefore, tended to stay in cities, or revolve around courts where their educational investments paid off. No one was going out to the country side to see to the peasants, you feel me? Moreover, the peasants couldn’t drag themselves off to a monastery for help when they got sick anymore, because monks weren’t supposed to be practicing medicine. There just wasn’t anywhere to go for help. By the early modern period, then, the poor had been stripped of a lot of the options they could exercise before.
All of this helped to create the system that America is experiencing today. Healthcare became a luxury – something that the rich elite had recourse to, and which everyone else had to do without. It is also a hugely modern ‘system’. No one is compelled by their religion to take care of the sick, despite the fact that America loves to call itself a Christian country. We compel bright young people who want to make money to go to med school, because there is a huge financial incentive. Being a medical doctor gets you paid. We do not tell them they have a responsibility to treat the sick when they are trained.
This health care system also routinely marginalises people who provide medical care but are not physicians, in particular those who are providing medical care in one of the traditionally ‘feminine’ roles. Nurses and midwives have much much more patient contact than doctors do, but are paid nowhere near as much. Hell, in America you might be paying out the nose for medical care and only ever see a nurse practitioner anyway, such are the vagaries of for-profit healthcare. So the nurse-practitioner ain’t getting paid, but you are still paying, and somehow all of this is fine and good.
None of this is to say that medical practitioners shouldn’t be paid for their services. It’s a hard job. You have to learn a lot. In the UK we really treat our junior doctors terribly and they deserve so much more. In the medieval period people still managed to treat people at all levels of society and still make a good living. The people who could afford to give away free health care in the medieval period (monks) had really comfortable life styles. The lower-level practitioners like barbers and midwives made their living on volume. There were options for patients and practitioners to enhance their quality of life.
Overall, then, while medicine has moved on from the medieval period and is much more effective – the healthcare options that many people in America have are actually much worse in comparison to what was available seven hundred years ago.
Perhaps even more distressing for enthusiasts of using ‘medieval’ to mean bad (which you should never do), is that America is a less caring society than Europe in the year 1300. Medieval Europeans were subject to strict class systems, many were unfree, and most lived lives of grinding poverty and work. Most people weren’t allowed to move down the road if they wanted to - but they were still considered deserving of health care.
Father Thames introducing his Offspring to the Fair City of London-historical cartoons(5/?)
Sir John Tenniel published this cartoon in Punch magazine on July, 3th, 1858. In this cartoon you see ‘Father Thames’ introducing his offspring to the 'Fair City of London’ (the woman on the left). The offspring’ are labelled 'Diphtheria’, 'Scrofula’ (tuberculosis) and 'Cholora’.
Until well into the 1800s, most people in London still got their water from the polluted rivers and streams, although most of the domestic and industrial waste was discharged directly into the rivers. This caused many waterborne diarrhoeal diseases and fevers, which still caused many deaths in the 19th century. (x)
I suppose you’re all wondering how my surgery went? Welp, it didn’t. The tl;dr is that they needed a special part that didn’t arrive in time and they’ve rescheduled me for September 22.
So like, basically they needed a special part for me because I’m a complicated case - it’s a replacement of a 1997 replacement and I have a femur rod in from breaking my femur years back and my original replacement was locked in there with cement, so it’s a complicated situation - & they had to order the special part, but like because of the holiday weekend, it didn’t arrive in time. But they thought it would, so I did the whole no food & drink thing, no pain pills, anxious mess, little sleep, showed up in my pajamas, waited curled up on 2 little chairs that were pushed together because I hurt too much to sit up, in a very cold waiting room, that’s like literally in a hallway, like their pre op waiting room is just a bunch of chairs in the main hallway, three hours before they called me back, where I then changed into a gown, started answering all their questions, had to use a Hoyer lift to get onto the bed because for some reason Ortho Surgery doesn’t have stretchers that drop low enough for wheelchair transfers even though they have all *Ortho* patients, which then the Hoyer lift caught my bad leg and the nurse had to twist it loose and it hurt so much and then another nurse came a minute later, and not having seen what had just happened, also grabbed my leg and started wrenching me around while the first nurse was like, “no, don’t do that!” but too late, and then the dr came and was like, “bad news” but the last time he said those words to me minutes before I was to be wheeled back to surgery it was to cancel so I was like, “WHAT WHY” and then I was like, “ok just go away then, I can’t even right now, I’m so hungry, tired, in pain,” and the nurse ran a off and came back with a big ol plastic bag filled with crackers, chips, pudding, applesauce, sodas like I had just robbed a vending machine. And I came home and ate and slept and cried and slept some more. And drank water, oh god so much delicious water. It’s the worst part about being NPO is the no water part. I’ve been rescheduled for September 22.
So I get to spend 2 more weeks in severe pain. And that’s like, Chronic Pain Sufferer’s *severe pain*, not just any ol pansy level of pain either, cuz my tolerance is high and I’m still over here whining like a pussy. I know they had me come in and everything because they thought it would arrive in the mail that day, but like, if they knew they had to order a special part, on a holiday weekend, like I don’t care how bad off my hip is that they felt they had to rush my surgery, they shoulda never tried to fit me in when they knew they had to special order a part on a holiday weekend. I can’t believe I have to go through all that pre op shit and the psychological prep in my head like all over again. If this is how the U of M - one of the top hospitals in the whole country, that people come from all over, from like other countries even, to have surgeries there - if this is how completely non-professional they act, what the fuck are other hospitals like?
![ultrafacts: Source: [x]Click HERE for more facts! The man is a disgrace to the title.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/fadf141b8c1140be37deb8b0657cf9c4/8f62abfef6ba8f83-ce/s500x750/f58771086b9939aaef56f5826d7d64afde31e26e.png "ultrafacts: Source: [x]Click HERE for more facts! The man is a disgrace to the title.")
