Disease

Reading to the dying

By Gail Bell

My friend Margaret hallucinated a wedding in the final weeks of her life. Some of her old animation briefly restored, she poured drinks for her guests, called for coffee, and asked me in a light, mocking tone what I thought of the groom. Happy to be invited, I jumped straight into the hallucination. People desperate to hold on to the dying have done worse. The stroll through the palliative ca

The Rise of Cosmetic Medicine

The Looks Department

By Tanveer Ahmed

Dr Joseph Ajaka came to the world of cosmetic medicine in 2006 after the messy rupture of his training to become an anaesthetist. After five years of specialist training, Ajaka was on the verge of sitting for the final exam. But a personal spat with a senior anaesthetist prevented him from engaging in a critical ‘practice viva’. “I was sick of being treated like shit,” says Ajaka. He

AIDS 30 Years on

A Quiet Anniversary

By Gail Bell

The taming of HIV/AIDS is Australia’s good news story. Our swift, egalitarian response – the so-called ‘Australian model’ – made us unique in the world and drew plaudits from the United Nations. Central to the success was the willingness of marginalised high-risk groups (intravenous drug users, gay men and sex workers) to collaborate with politicians, doctors and strategists to spread the message that the virus could not be co

The Home Hospice

Where the Heart Is

By Helen Garner

When they told our sister Marie that her untreatable lung cancer would kill her in less than a year, she said she wanted to die at home. She was a difficult, bossy person, but we rolled up our sleeves and resolved, with her friends and children, to wing it.One Sunday, seven months later, a widow who had home-nursed her husband emerged from Marie’s bedroom

Dancing in the Dark

By Benjamin Law

From the outside, the Snoezelen Room at the Gold Coast’s Mudgeeraba Special School (MSS) doesn’t look like much. The room’s padlocked entrance is almost creepy, resembling a fire exit that’s been bolted up. As she fiddles with the large master locks, h

Duty of Care

By Margaret Simons

Pluck an episode from the midstream of human life and it can be hard to glean meaning. Sometimes there is just senselessness and mess. If there is a theme to the events that have interrupted these women’s lives, however, it is surely care, and its opposite,

600 Million Rabbits & Myxomatosis

By Shane Maloney

Rabbits are poor conservers of energy. They can’t adapt to drought. Their diet is not diverse. All in all, they are not well suited to the Australian environment. But when it comes to reproduction they can’t be bettered. Mating takes 30 seconds, courtship included.

Close at Hand

By Kate Rossmanith

One morning in 1683, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a merchant and amateur scientist in the Dutch city of Delft, set about the daily ritual of cleaning his teeth. Proud of his teeth, but perturbed by the solid white growth he could see between them, he scraped off s

A Fava Fresca!

By Gay Bilson

Early in October the broad beans began to appear, but were still so small that it was mere ritual to nip one or two off and eat them whole. The pods, about 6 centimetres long, are at first difficult to see. They rise close to the hollow, square-ribbed stem which is at l

What Happened in the Gulf Country

The Brutal Truth

By Tony Roberts

In 1881, a massive pastoral boom commenced in the top half of the Northern Territory, administered by the colonial government in Adelaide.1 Elsey Station on the Roper River – romanticised in Jeannie Gunn’s We of the Never Never – was the first to be esta

Luke Davies on Christine Jeffs’ ‘Sunshine Cleaning’

Dirty Work

By Luke Davies

Television’s police-procedural dramas have suffered for some time now from a disease for which there is as yet no apparent cure. It hasn’t been adequately studied or named, but might best be thought of as Forensic Overkill Syndrome. It multiplies by the da

Numismatics

By Clive James

The Idea of the North

Travels in the Northern Realm

By Nicolas Rothwell

Given such characteristics, it is no great wonder that Western incomers, over the past two centuries of concerted northern settlement, have been perplexed and ill at ease in their new imperium, which they have endeavoured constantly to describe and classify, to comprehend and capture, without a strong sense of confidence that the landscape will surrender t

‘The Story of Forgetting’ by Stefan Merrill Block

By Zora Simic

The CSIRO and the Total Wellbeing Diet

Confounders

By Geoff Russell

In late May 2005, this prestigious scientific organisation launched a diet book, The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet. Despite attracting criticism from nutritionists, including Rosemary Stanton, for its high protein content and its research basis, the Total Wellbei

Unforgiven

By Craig Sherborne

Oliver Sacks’s ‘Musicophilia’

Wunderbar

By Anna Goldsworthy

Written in the Body

By Ashley Hay

On a table of its own, in the pulmonary section of the Museum of Human Disease at the University of New South Wales, sits a solid-looking object, jet black but glistening as if it's been sprinkled with some crushed jewel, some metallic powder. It's an elliptical shape - or half an ellipse, flat on the side you see first, the side of its dissection - and it's set in formalin, in a heavy perspex box