Reviews

Oppenheimer

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I went to see Oppenheimer yesterday. I much preferred it to Barbie! It was a very well-acted and interesting film, with layers of complexity, lots of talking points, and which is definitely worth going to see in my opinion. I saw it on an IMAX screen, which was a novelty for me, and that added to my enjoyment of the film.

I don’t know very much about Oppenheimer’s life and can’t really comment on the veracity of much of the story it told, although I guess all biographies are a matter of interpretation anyway. Despite my enjoyment here are a few more critical random thoughts:

  • The opening scenes promised a much more complex and in-depth film about the mind of Oppenheimer, and his ethical and political dilemmas, than was actually portrayed subsequently in most of the film.
  • The two court battles that take up much of the film sometimes come across as rather flat in my opinion, despite director Christopher Nolan playing around with linearity. I felt there was a lack of dramatic tension here, and in much of the first two-thirds of the film, which only really changes and develops towards the end.
  • A lot of the film was based around the intrigue and personal jealousies between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, about which I knew little (and for this at least I would have liked more contextualisation early on). As it was I couldn’t help but feel the film didn’t really nail the way the American state came for Oppenheimer in the post war years, despite his heroic status as ‘father of the atom bomb’.
  • The devastating effects of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only shown through the prism of Oppenheimer’s mind. So we only get a glimpse of the flayed skin Oppenheimer envisions in the faces of the audience at a meeting he attends. The full deadly and horrific effects of the bombings are not shown, and I thought the film was much less powerful for this omission.
  • The portrayal of women in the film is very weak. The characters and biographies of Jean Tatlock and Kitty Oppenheimer are really very interesting politically and personally – and although this is hinted at in the film, these two characters are not given the time or depth they deserve (despite being well-acted by Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt)
  • Cillian Murphy really does have the most piercingly blue eyes (at least on the IMAX screen).
  • Tom Conti as Einstein was too cartoonish to be credible.

Review of Getting Better by Michael Rosen

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David Rosenberg in conversation with Michael Rosen. Stratford Old Town Hall. June 2023

I have just finished reading Michael Rosen’s book Getting Better: Life lessons in going under; getting over it and getting through it. It is an extraordinary book, which I appreciated even more having heard Michael speak about it and give a reading from it at a wonderful community event at Stratford Old Town Hall at the end of June.

When I initially saw the sub-title about ‘life lessons’ I feared Michael might be laying down tips for living a better life – echoing the kind of ‘positivity’ mantra that follows the ‘always look on the bright side’ of life from people who you feel might have experienced very few dark sides. Michael does give ‘life tips’ in this book, but he does so in a way that is far from the false positivity and manufactured hope of some ‘self-help’ books. This is non-prescriptive writing, which always recognises that many of us are just not in a position economically, socially or psychologically to follow such advice.  

This is a book that is rich with Michael’s own experience of illness, of grief, of feelings of failure and full of exploration about the ways he has been able to cope with his feelings and to live through and beyond them. Here are stories from Michael’s own childhood, his relationships with his parents, the ‘family secret’ of the dead brother that no-one talked about and of discovering the history of his family members in the Holocaust.

The book also describes Michael’s own experiences with illness and death – his 12 years of suffering undiagnosed with hypothyroidism, the death of his son Eddie when just nearly 19, and Michael’s subsequent experience of grief, and his own near-death experience with Covid – spending 40 days and nights in a coma at the start of the pandemic, being cared for by NHS nurses and doctors.

Resonances

Everyone will take their own unique ‘lessons’ from this book, and relate Michael’s life experiences to different areas of their own life. For me, the following three ‘lessons’ (if you want to call them that – I would prefer ‘resonances’ I think) felt particularly apt.

Firstly, Michael’s experience living with the undiagnosed symptoms of hypothyroidism struck a real chord of recognition with me. He spent 12 long years feeling like a ‘blob’, suffering a range of disparate symptoms from his underactive thyroid gland – including slurred speech, puffed up features, clammy skin, not being able to hold himself or walk properly or even to focus and think sharply. Once diagnosed, he felt a deep sadness at what had happened to him and his life as ‘my list of disconnected symptoms collapsed into one case: me.’  Once put on suitable drugs, it was as if he had come alive and yet he still had to reckon with what he might have done and who he could have been if he hadn’t been through those untreated years; life had been pre-Blob, Blob, and post-Blob. How could the strands of this life be knitted together, and was the person he had been and who he became all the Blob’s fault, or was that just a convenient excuse?

These feelings so resonated with me due to my own belated diagnosis of an illness of another endocrine gland, the pituitary. I spent around six years with an undiagnosed macro-prolactinoma, a benign tumour on the pituitary gland that caused excessive secretion of the hormone prolactin (usually only secreted to produce breast milk) and which eventually grew over my optic nerves, causing me to have tunnel and dimmed vision, so I could no longer see to read or go about my daily life. Like Michael, before diagnosis I suffered a range of disparate symptoms, which for me included gaining a huge amount of weight (without over-eating), experiencing severe and debilitating headaches, feeling extremely fatigued, losing all interest in sex, my periods becoming very irregular and then stopping altogether… and then the gradual loss of sight, which eventually led to me being rushed into hospital as an emergency, with doctors fearing permanent loss of my sight. Similarly to Michael, once I was diagnosed and treated I had to come to terms with so many areas of my life that had been altered by my illness, and to grapple with exactly what aspects of my life had been due to the tumour, what may have happened anyway, and had the tumour just been a convenient excuse for what I’ve perceived as so many failures in my life. This has remained a constant question for me, as although my sight returned many of the symptoms remained (plus some other ones caused by the drug I took to treat the tumour).

Secondly, I learned that I should use olive oil on my ingrowing toenails – a lesson taught to Michael by a podiatrist after his toenails (which had dropped off when he was in hospital with Covid) started growing back into his skin.

Writing through it

Thirdly, the way Michael explains how it has always helped him to feel better about his feelings and experiences if he writes about them really struck a chord with me. In his chapter, ‘Words’, he provides a wonderful exploration of just what words, and playing with words and sentences, can do for the person writing them – even if no-one else sees them. Writing can ‘objectivise experience’, it can provide distance or a different angle and perspective. ‘This kind of writing and thinking can take the edge off pain,’ he writes. ‘It can take us away from that desperate, nowhere-to-go, living-in-hell feeling and transport us for a while into something much calmer, cooler, more detached.’

I have often felt like this about writing. I do not mean the writing I do for public consumption or publication, nor the writing for academic essays or my PhD thesis – that kind of writing can be quite tortuous for me. I mean writing for myself – in the diaries and journals I have kept since I was 17 with their ‘stream of consciousness’ about aspects of my life. This would seem like meaningless drivel to an external reader, and sometimes does to myself on the few occasions I’ve re-read my journals. Rather what is important is the process of writing things down, of working things through in your mind, of somehow externalising it, which is what feels so valuable. I would urge anyone who wants to read about writing your way through difficult feelings, trauma and grief to take a look at Michael’s chapter.

Of course if you do share your writing with a friend or family member, or if you write for publication, there is something else going on too. As Michael writes, this makes writing different from just talking things through with someone – ‘you are sharing something you’ve unfolded on to a page, making it into a shape. It’s you, but in a way it’s not you, because now it’s out there, separate from you.’

I am profoundly grateful to Michael for putting his thoughts and emotions ‘out there’ so that we too can find our own meanings in his words and the ways they might resonate with our own lives.

Michael Rosen, Getting Better: life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it, (London, Ebury Press, 2023).

Review of This Mortal Coil by Fay Bound Alberti

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This review was first published in October 2016 on the BMJ Medical Humanities blog here

Fay Bound Alberti, This Mortal Coil: the human body in history and culture, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)

We all have stories to tell about our bodies. They are, as Fay Bound Alberti writes, ‘the inescapable material reality we live with and in.’ In today’s scientific and medical world, however, our bodies are often viewed as a series of parts to be examined rather than an interconnected whole. In This Mortal Coil, Alberti explores the history of how and why we came to see our bodies as an assemblage of parts to be scrutinised, assessed and treated. Reading this book, I was reminded of my own story of how I came to be diagnosed with a large, benign tumour on my pituitary gland. I spent over two years seeking treatment from my GP and optician for what seemed to me to be a variety of unconnected symptoms. Finally, during an emergency visit to hospital when my eyesight failed, one doctor asked me to describe everything I could remember about changes in my life and body in recent years. It was only when I recounted my seemingly disparate symptoms of gaining weight, frequent headaches, feeling anxious, irregular periods and failing eyesight as one narrative story that the doctors were able to make a diagnosis. Such a holistic approach is all too rare in the context of today’s highly specialised, and often under-resourced, medical services, however. As Alberti highlights, ‘Today’s government funding, research, building, and personnel resources form separate systems to deal with mental health (psychiatry and psychology), the heart (cardiology), the brain (neuroscience), the skin (dermatology), the gut (gastroenterology), and so on.’

In This Mortal Coil, Alberti features a series of historical case studies to examine how we came to view the body, and its ailments and injuries, in this compartmentalised way. She starts with the moving story of her teenage daughter Millie’s diagnosis with scoliosis, a severe curvature of the spine, which has caused her great discomfort and pain. Millie has had to endure endless surgery to try to straighten her spine, including the insertion of metal rods into her back, causing Alberti to ask, ‘At what point do the rods and screws become part of her “real” body?’ Millie’s spine was treated as a discrete object to be assessed and treated, disconnected from her emotions about her spine and her anxieties about her body image. Millie’s story foregrounds some of the major themes of the book – the separation between the body and the mind, and the ruptures between our sense of self and our bodily organs. As Alberti writes, ‘In modern health care our ability to treat the spine as a part we can repair, like the heart, like a limb, necessarily displaces our “self” from the body part in question.’

In the ensuing chapters, Alberti takes us on a fascinating voyage through the body and its parts examining the history of the skeleton, heart, brain and stomach, and the less charted territory of the breasts and genitals, the skin and the tongue. In each case, Alberti shows how changes in medical knowledge, and in the language and metaphors we use to explain and describe our bodies, have transformed the way we have experienced, lived within and felt about our bodies. This journey takes us through political, medical and philosophical developments that transformed our understanding of the body as being controlled by the balance of the four humours, to the brain-centred understanding we have of the body today. Moreover, these changes in the conceptualisation of the body and its organs have always been inflected with historically-specific gendered and racialized assumptions about human behaviour and emotions. Taking an explicitly feminist perspective throughout, Alberti explores how differences between the sexes were naturalised and encoded in scientific and medical texts. She looks, for example, at how the bones were gendered by the scientific classifications of the structure and shape of the male and female skeleton. The assumption that women will have smaller skeletons, developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, has meant that even today physically large women, or conversely physically small men, have not been recognised in archaeological surveys of human remains.

Such gendered explanations come to the fore in the chapters where Alberti focuses on the history of female bodies, and how scientific and medical ideas about female and male bodies have naturalised inequality between men and women. I found the chapters on the history of the breast and female sexual organs to be some of the most compelling and original in the book. In her chapter on female genitalia, for example, Alberti traces the often overlooked history of the vagina, the vulva, the hymen and the clitoris. She shows how the vagina has often been viewed and represented, in both medical and cultural texts, by the absence of a penis, a ‘no thing’, as it is described in the slang Shakespeare deploys in Hamlet. Even today, Alberti argues, dictionary definitions seldom describe the vagina as a sexual organ in and of itself, but rather as a canal or a passage, leading to elsewhere – its purpose presumably to gratify the male penetrator. Female sexual organs have historically been very sketchily represented in medical textbooks. This is particularly the case with the clitoris, the one human organ designed solely to provide pleasure, which remains the most under-researched and under-represented organ of the female body. As Alberti writes, the clitoris ‘symbolises historically persistent fears about female sexuality: disorderly, uncontrollable, and independent, a force for agency above and beyond its medico-scientific and social framework’. In contrast, the far less biologically complex flap of skin in the vagina, the hymen, has been invested with undue medical and cultural significance, repeatedly referred to as literal and figurative ‘evidence’ of a woman’s virginity and purity.

Alberti also traces how absence of body hair has come to be seen as an ideal of feminine beauty in Westernised societies. How did we get to a place, Alberti asks, ‘where the almost complete removal of public hair, a process that is painful, inconvenient, expensive, and repetitive, is not only fashionable but also the idealised “norm”, female body hair being seen, at least in most of Europe and the United States as unattractive, unfeminine, and even dirty?’ Here she pinpoints how excessive body hair on women became pathologized in the 19th century, particularly with the development of evolutionary theory whereby excessive body hair became associated with being animal-like and primitive. In the case of Julia Patrana, a black woman with excessive body hair who was exhibited across Europe in a touring ‘human zoo’ in the 1850s and 1860s, we see how gendered and racialized prejudices intersected in medical and popular representations about the black, female body.

Alberti even devotes a chapter to the gendered history of the tongue, exploring how the tongue has been a powerful metaphor confirming women as lesser beings than men. If I had previously considered the tongue as a biological entity, it had been as a rather innocuous organ that enabled us to speak and communicate. Although technically the tongue is sexless and without individual agency, Alberti argues that its history is ‘rife with social, sexual, psychological, linguistic, and physiological significance.’ The tongue, like all organs of the body, cannot be separated by the gendered linguistic metaphors that have been used to describe it. Female tongues have historically been seen as untrustworthy and as a threat to social order. In early modern Britain, the 17th and 18thcenturies, for example, women were frequently characterised as having ‘vexatious’, ‘sharp’ or ‘scolding’ tongues – as illustrated by the character of Katherine, the ‘nag’ in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. By the 18thcentury, women’s tongues were said to drive men to violence, and an ‘evil tongue’ was enough to exonerate a man from beating, and even murdering, his wife. Cruel punishments were devised to keep women’s tongues under control – including the ‘scold’s bridle’, a metal contraption that was strapped to the woman’s head to prevent her from speaking.

Although Alberti analyses the organs of the body in separate chapters, she skilfully subverts the view of the body as an assemblage of disparate parts. By taking the body apart, she writes, we might even be able to reconstruct it anew. She concludes the book with a call for a holistic approach to the body and its ailments, one that views the body as more than the sum of its parts. My fear is that this holistic approach is out of sync with the current direction of medical thought and practice in a neoliberal capitalist economy, where medical research and treatment is dominated by competing specialisms and by giant pharmaceutical companies, which seem to be ever more voraciously targeting their wares on specific bodily organs and diseases in the race to maximise profits. As Alberti remarks in her conclusion, although the body represents the limits of our sense of self, the skin marking the boundary between ourselves and the world, we are not self-contained beings, separate from the social and political environments we inhabit. Rather, writes Alberti, we are ‘social beings that communicate with others – not only through tongues as symbols and organs, but through social practices, behaviours and our very materiality.’  It would be interesting to explore further the ways in which social structures and practices, such as the dominance of work in our daily lives and constraints on time and leisure, have altered our bodies and the way we think, feel and talk about them.

In This Mortal Coil, Alberti has provided a compelling history, which explores the relationship between the biological body, with its bones, skin, guts and genitals, and the language and metaphors we use to describe it, without reducing one to the other. Written accessibly, and in beautiful prose, this book will appeal to historians, social scientists, medical professionals and the general reader alike. Highly recommended.