Rachel > Recent Status Updates

Absolutely endearing prose, and I very much enjoyed the romp through Dublin’s history. Unfortunately, the memoir portion is a bit too Boomer-coded for my taste — certainly he’s a product of his time, as are we all, but his narrative seems intended for the select few. A well-wrought memoir but in the end I’m left feeling a bit underwhelmed.

“I wanted to understand the terms of our conversation, whose reality were we operating in. What time period? Who got to define the terms of time and life and death? In so many ways, that fight felt like a microcosm of womanhood—a game in which someone is constantly changing the rules so you always lose. Maybe that’s why I was so bothered by it. It never felt truly like a joke, but like a manipulation.”

“It’s nice to think of science as objective truth, but it can be impossible to entirely disentangle scientific truth from the sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and racism of the people practicing science in a specific historical and cultural context. Science can be used and misused to affirm or deny the experiences of women, people of color, LGBTQ people.”

“Furthermore, the [Catholic hospitals’] directives specifically state that a person’s decision is to be followed ‘so long as it does not contradict Catholic principles.’ In other words: Catholicism trumps personal agency, every time.”

“If the guiding principle in my life is non-absolutism, then my job as a physician is to acknowledge another person’s truth and recognize that our truths may not be synonymous. For this reason, I find it incredibly important to provide both prenatal care and abortion care in my practice.”

“In her book Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies, Rebecca Kukla writes that the ultrasounds have publicized the interiority of a woman’s body, that they look toward the fetus and away from the mother. Doctors and politicians, to assess a pregnancy, look inside, at the cells, and neglect to look outside, at the mother.”

“When a woman the medical establishment determines is obese becomes pregnant, the risk we should be concerned about is not the risk to the fetus but the risk that the mother won’t be treated as fully human. […] A doctor’s inability to see the woman for the weight means they often miss warning signs, which increases the risk of complications.”

“…a Johns Hopkins professor in 1912 indicated that most American doctors were less competent than the midwives. Not only were the doctors themselves unreliable about preventing sepsis and ophthalmia but they also tended to be too ready to use surgical techniques which endangered mother or child.”

“The Flexner Report [1910] was the foundations' ultimatum to American medicine. In its wake, medical schools closed by the score, including 6 of America's 8 black medical schools and a majority of "irregular" schools which had been a haven for female students. Medicine was established once and for all as a branch of “higher”learning, accessible only through lengthy and expensive university training.” (p 32)

A way of counting what, hmmm? What might last 29 days?? I appreciate the author’s homage to women in the inclusion of “he or she,” but his otherwise near erasure of women from his history is somewhat tiresome.

“About 43,000 years ago, another human [...] invented something else quite extraordinary: a tool for counting. Over time he or she made twenty-nine marks (or notches) along the bone, and archaeologists speculate that these might have been produced for some kind of ritual or, more likely, were a form of a tally: a way of counting.” (pp. 115-116)

“We surveyed four hundred autistic adults like Jonah who had attended our clinic in Cambridge, and tragically we found that two-thirds of them had felt suicidal and one-third of them had actually attempted suicide. What more of a wake-up call does society need that autistic people are struggling and desperately vulnerable?” (p. 78)

"Perhaps love and attention are really the same thing. One can't exist without the other. The Brutish scholar Avner Offer calls attention 'the universal currency of well-being.'"

"My early poetry was execrable. As with most bad poets, I was unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave some worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning. My mother remained tolerant even as I left reeking little piles of doggerel lying around the house. She was indulgent of her only child even if he was as blithely incontinent as an unhousebroken llama." (p. 185)

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Using the Goodreads Droid Android app!