Author: Dish Staff

by Dish Staff

Julie Beck explains how TV medical dramas have warped our perception of health care and illness:

Treatments for patients with seizures are sometimes downright dangerous, with doctors trying to hold patients down, or put things in their mouths (they could choke). Patients tend to survive cardiac arrest more often on television than they do in real life, making CPR seem more effective than it often is. “That can lead to a misunderstanding as to the likelihood of a patient or loved one surviving a cardiac arrest,” says Dr. David Brown, chair of the department of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. “But it isn’t really good TV if everybody dies, right?”

What does make for good TV: Rare diseases. Injuries. Natural disasters. Which means the amount of screen time given to different conditions isn’t proportional to how common those diseases are in real life, according to a new study published in Human Communication Research. People flock to these shows, after all, first and foremost to be entertained. So less sensational, more quotidian conditions like diabetes are underrepresented.

by Dish Staff

Etgar Keret speculates about why he turned to writing:

What I feel about fiction is that it’s removed from life, that nothing in it is real, the characters can die or have wings. For me it’s a great release. I’m the kind of person who thinks about the consequences of his actions. Especially as the youngest son of two Holocaust survivors. One of the first things I knew about my mother was that her mother and her brother were murdered in front of her eyes and that a year after that her father was murdered too. She was in the Warsaw ghetto. So from very early on I realized that if my mother were to ask me if I wanted to eat another cucumber, regardless of what I might or might not want, if I said yes, then this woman, whom I loved more than life itself and who had suffered so much, would be happy. And if I said no, then she would not be happy. So the idea was that whatever I felt or did resonated in life, caused people pain or happiness. This gave me a feeling of huge responsibility even as a child – to the extent that sometimes I had to block my own feelings or wishes. When I started writing fiction, suddenly I was allowed to do what I wanted.

by Dish Staff

David Sheff was struck by that fact during a recent visit to the impound lot:

I took a cab and entered a single-story brick building where a few dozen people were crowded together in a scene that evoked Kafka; weariness, frustration and anger were palpable. Some stood in line, some paced and some sat hunched on the floor. A family huddled in a corner, an infant asleep on the father’s shoulder. A woman on a pay phone wept as she begged whomever was on the line to find money so she could get her car back–she said she needed $875. “I’m gonna lose my job if I’m not there at 5.”

Clerks sat on stools behind Plexiglas. At a window, a man pleaded with an agent, “I have to pick up my kids in less than an hour. What am I supposed to do?” At the next window, another man railed loudly and furiously, yelling, “How the hell am I supposed to get my goddam money if I can’t get to goddam work?” The clerk said, “If you can’t get cash, you can pay by credit card or cashier’s check.” The man shouted, “And if I had a goddam limousine, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

by Dish Staff

Virginia Postrel suggests some improvements for hospital-room decor:

When the University Medical Center of Princeton tested a mock-up room with nice views, a sofa for guests and no roommates, it found that patients asked for 30 percent less pain medication, reports the New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. This result shouldn’t be surprising.

The seminal study on the subject was published in 1984 — that’s right, 30 years ago — in Science. Roger S. Ulrich, now an architecture professor at the Center for Healthcare Building Research at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden after many years at Texas A&M University, compared two groups of patients recovering from gallbladder surgery in the same hospital, matching patients for characteristics such as age and obesity that might affect their recovery. One group looked out on some trees while the other faced a brick wall; their rooms were otherwise almost the same. Patients with a view of the trees required significantly less high-powered pain medication and left the hospital earlier, after 7.96 days versus 8.70.

Thirty years of follow-up research later, and it’s still news when someone designs a hospital room with a view.

(Photo by Flickr user whatsthatpicture)

by Dish Staff

Karen Abbot discusses women’s experiences in the Civil War South:

In the sudden absence of husbands, fathers, brothers and beaus, white Southern women discovered a newfound freedom — one that simultaneously granted them more power in relationships and increased their likelihood of heartbreak. Gone were the traditions of antebellum courtships, where family connections and wealth were paramount and a closed circle of friends and neighbors scrutinized potential mates, a process that could last for years. The war’s disruptions forced elite Southern parents to loosen rules regarding chaperoning and coquetry, which one prominent lecturer called “an artful mixture of hypocrisy, fraud, treachery and falsehood” that risked tarnishing a girl’s reputation. The girls themselves relinquished the anticipation, instilled since birth, that they would one day assume their positions as wives, mothers and slave mistresses, that their lives would be steeped in every privilege and comfort. The war ultimately challenged not only long-held traditions of courtship and marriage, but the expectation that one might wed at all.

Turning ahead several decades, Niamh Gallagher reviews Elisabeth Shipton’s Female Tommies, which chronicles women’s role in World War I:

Significantly, Shipton’s work suggests that the war may have marked a watershed for women after all, at least for those engaged in the military. She argues that “the place to look for the lasting effects of the militarisation of women in the First World War is not 1919 but twenty years further on, in 1939”. For example, the famous Bletchley Park Wrens (members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) who participated in decoding the secret communications of the Axis during the Second World War had their origins in the Hushwaacs, a section of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps formed in 1917 in the wake of persistent efforts by British “female Tommies” to force the War Office to form an official women’s military corps.

A century after the Great War began, and at a time when the changing roles of women in the armed forces are a focus of media attention and public debate, Female Tommies is a valuable resource for those keen to learn about individuals who helped to lay the foundations for women’s frontline participation in wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.