Author: chisomowrites

Dr Chisomo Kalinga is a Chancellor's Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Her work is interdisciplinary sitting at the intersections of literature, anthropology, critical health and medical humanities, ethnography and participatory action research. Her research interests are disease (specifically sexually transmitted infections), illness and wellbeing, biomedicine, traditional healing and witchcraft and their narrative representation in African oral and print literature.
Posted on

Old Blog, New Blog

I’ve decided to retire my old medical humanities blog and merge it with this one. I liked the idea of having two separate blogs, one where I could articulate my thoughts on issues relevant to the medical humanities and the other where I could talk crap and reminisce about my old favorite shows like the 1990s teen soap gem, Passions.

But I found myself constantly ‘purifying’ both, deleted posts mostly from this one and then maintaining the medhums one. But my login email from the other blog was retired before I got a chance to designate a new address for it.

So I’ve decided to retire the other one and post everything on this blog. For future reference, the old link is here: https://chisomokcl.wordpress.com

Posted on

Caring for the future

So the PhD is done. Graduation happened. I was stunned and by the tremendous showing of support of my family who came together from far and wide to celebrate the day (22nd July at the Barbican Centre in London). I have lived in solitude for more than 2 years now trying to finish this beast and am now trying to reintegrate myself into the world again. It’s not easy but I’m getting better at it. Being sociable used to be natural and now it is so foreign! Therefore, it was important to have people come and stand by me even though I haven’t been by them for years.

Also, I was very lucky to immediately commence work after graduating. I’ve accepted a research fellowship at IASH, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I will be looking at Church of Scotland records from its medical missionaries and nurses in British Central Africa Protectorate/Nyasaland/Malawi. Through my project, I am trying to understand the human response to illness. I’m particularly interested in Malawi so I’m going way back to the first meeting of the missionaries and the indigenous tribes. I’ll be looking at the first written documentations of both Western biomedical and traditional healing practices. I’d like to investigate what led to Malawi’s dire present state of medical service by taking part of the university’s ‘Caring for the Future Through Ancestral Time’ project (more info here: http://ancestraltime.org.uk/about-the-project/).

Up front, I’m relatively jovial but in solitude I am deeply concerned with affairs of the world. I am a card-carrying humanist and am also concerned about environmental sustainability, particularly through access to health care for everyone. These issues fuel my research interests. 

So I’m in Malawi now, just doing some prep work on what has to be done, collecting data and visiting necessary archives. Here is a picture of Malawi’s beautiful church, which was one of the first in the count. I’ll be working nearby in their archives in December. 

Blantyre CCAP Mission 

I’ll also spend some time canvassing the archives at the Society of Malawi library which is located on the top floor of the Mandala house building another historical site in Blantyre. Then of course there are the Malawiana room archives at Chancellor College, part of the University of Malawi and I’ll be making a special trip to Livingstonia, the site of the first Church of Scotland mission to Malawi. 

Posted on

Celebrities and their Anti-vaccination opinions….

This week both Jenny McCarthy and Kristin Cavallari, two starlets whose work I am almost entirely unfamiliar with, came under fire this week for their anti-vaccination stances. McCarthy’s assault was more innocuous, she posed a simple question on Twitter asking her fans what they seek in a partner using the #AskJenny hashtag. She was bombarded with an assault on her maligned position that links autism to vaccinations. Cavillari, I must say, was a bit more sweet in her approach asserting that she was ‘just a mom trying to make the best decisions for her kids’ to justify her refusal to vaccinate them. She cited grossly outdated ‘research’ and ‘books’ (no further articulation was provided) that establish a causal relationship between childhood vaccinations and autism. 

I normally avoid as much celebrity news and gossip as I can; however, I always pay attention to such stories when celebrities attempt to engage their fan-base with pseudoscience and cannot fathom the scathing condemnation they face from actual medical professionals who rebut their nonsense with actual knowledge. In response to these celebrity positions, one doctor offered his position. “Of course, every parent wants what is best for their own children,” said Donald Burke, M.D., dean of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. “But failure to vaccinate children against preventable contagious diseases puts not only their own children at risk, but it increases the risk of epidemics for everyone.” [Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-cavallari-vaccinate-children-20140319,0,484158.story#ixzz2wXmGANhX%5D Thank you, Dean Burke! This should be end of story, but alas it is not. 

I am a researcher in the medical humanities, a field of studies that seeks to understand how the humanities as a discipline informs the study of medicine and vice versa. I am not a medical doctor but I do have a doctorate which focused on the literary approach to the medical humanities. And in my research, I asserted that the practice and understanding of medicine is intrinsically inseparable from culture. I believe that the anti-vaxxer position is inspired by a well-meaning (though thoroughly uninformed) initiative to confront the culture of big-pharma, the sheer lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry in the United States. However, in the rejection of this legitimately powerful lobby they have run into the arms of the big placebo, a renewed faith in pseudoscience based in the rejection of clinical medicine. So we’re at a crossroads. How do we encourage parents to make the best decisions for their kids that are informed by accurate, credible studies? 

Posted on

On the passing of the Iron Lady

On the passing of the Iron Lady

I frequently pass by this graffiti sprayed onto a warehouse conversion en route to London Bridge. I often wonder about its messenger specifically whether (s)he feels despondent about the future of England or if this is symptomatic of general London pessimism.