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‘Out, damned spot!’
Published in Alan Bleakley, Educating Doctors’ Senses Through the Medical Humanities, 2020
What a medical student is negotiating here is a complex set of cultural rules within wider society and within the specific culture of medicine about what is taboo and polluting to the body. While wider society finds bodily fluids and waste such as (another’s) shit, piss, snot, phlegm, pus, sweat and blood to various degrees obnoxious, doctors, health care workers and carers must of course pass over a boundary daily to tolerate the abject. But they do this ‘professionally’, where their primary role is a sworn eradication of pathogens causing suffering and disease. This is looking the abject in the face, where – biologically – the primary abject is actually the disease-causing pathogen and not its immediate symptom in the form of bodily fluids (Curtis 2014).
Introduction
Published in Alan Bleakley, Routledge handbook of the medical humanities, 2019
The abject includes all that human society wishes to contain, be rid of or cast out, and yet must integrate: general pollution and ‘waste’; and bodily fluids and waste: shit, piss, snot, sputum, phlegm, menstrual blood, semen, pus, sweat and blood. A major function of religion has been to set out rules of purification that prevent supposed pollution. Medicine follows this same route, priest becoming doctor. Medicine’s encounter with the abject is so fundamental that it is never formally articulated as such in medical education, despite the common ritual of giving thanks to those who have donated their bodies to the anatomy laboratory. It is rather acted out through medical socialisation in well-known rituals, beginning again with learning anatomy through dissection. Medical students (in the UK fresh from school, at age 18) encounter human cadavers embalmed in formalin, the aqueous version of formaldehyde that is essentially a poison.
The psychobiology underlying swearing and taboo language
Published in Philip N. Murphy, The Routledge International Handbook of Psychobiology, 2018
Swearing is the use of offensive, obscene or taboo language (Soanes, 2002) and is a linguistic feature in most human cultures (van Lancker & Cummings, 1999). To swear is to utter a word or phrase that is considered taboo, or in other words, forbidden. Notably, it appears to be the swear words or phrases themselves that are taboo rather than the semantic meaning they convey. For example, if you observed a dog using a street corner as its toilet, it would not be taboo for you to express a disdain for dogs urinating on the road, whereas it would be mildly so to refer to dog piss.
(Loss of) the super soldier: combat-injuries, body image and veterans’ romantic relationships
Published in Disability and Rehabilitation, 2023
Mary Keeling, Nicholas David Sharratt
… oh God, I was like 17 stone, ripped and sort of peak physical condition of a, of an infant’eer. Um, you know, gym regularly, um, cardiovasularly fit, muscular, yeah…sort of prime, prime ideal stereotypical military fitness… I mean, apart from the obvious benefits that being in that position poses, uh, there’s the banter-ish side where, you know, if you’re a bit tubby and not able to run, your mates take the piss out of you a little bit. Um [pause] so, you know, when the shitith hiteth the faneth, as it were, um, you know, you need to be able to protect yourself and your mates and you can’t really do that as an infantry if you’re, you know a bit large around the midriff and get out of breath at a run [laughs] (Dave, below knee amputation, facial, head and torso scarring).
Understanding information sharing about rare diseases: an evaluation of the NIH's website on AATD
Published in Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 2018
Xun Zhu, Rachel A. Smith, Roxanne L. Parrott, Amber K. Worthington
Participants also requested more information on treatment and testing. Some participants requested more information on where their families could get qualified and anonymous testing. Other participants wanted to see detailed discussion on treatment, including, for example, ‘what trials led to the treatment's release, is it being tried in a preventive fashion or only when a significant amount of lung capacity has already been lost?’ A major concern among these participants was that the website paid more attention to the severe than the mild version of the disease. For example, one participant noted, ‘The PiSS genotype was not discussed. The S and Z genotypes do not have comparable risk. More content discussing the impact S, Z and null is needed’. Another participant wanted to learn about MZ or MS alleles in order to avoid environments and change personal behavior to reduce the risks of developing symptoms.
The Dog Who Barks and the Noise of the Human: Psychoanalysis After the Animal Turn
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2018
The space between diminution and devaluation of the olfactory is the gap of the humanimal, for whom species distinction remains a perpetual question and “defensive operation” (Ray, 2014, p. 30). As Ray underscores with Freud, substances, sensations, body parts, whole objects, and other animals associated with the olfactory are subject to a moral devaluation (Ray, 2014, p. 25). The hierarchalization and moralization of the senses (vision over sight), of sensory matter (cleanliness over blood and piss and shit), and of sensed and sexed boundaries (closed over open, phallic presence over lack/castration) are heirs to this gap. It is an inheritance passed on through culture and through such human activities as those recorded in the main text of Freud’s (1930) divided study “Civilization and Its Discontents.” But, as Ray (2014) wonderfully illuminates, between the lines of Freud’s text, and in the tension between main text and footnotes, a different possibility tugs at the side of the human–animal boundary.