The Ezra Klein Show Best Of: Barbara Kingsolver on ‘Urban/Rural Antipathy’ This episode was recorded some time ago, when Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead had just been released (see my review of the book here) I knew that Kingsolver was from Appalacia, but I hadn’t realized how much she saw this as an Appalacian story and her attempt to breach the chasm of understanding between urban and rural Americans. This was before the Second Coming of Trump, and in many ways she foreshadows it here. Good interview.
The Human Subject (BBC) The Mothers of Gynaecology This is the story of a 17 year old enslaved girl – Anarcha – and the other enslaved women who gave birth to the field of gynaecology. The year is 1845 and Anarcha has just had a baby. But there’s a problem. She was in great pain and her doctor, J Marion Sims, believed nothing can be done about it – at least at first.
She had developed a vesico-vaginal fistula, a hole between her bladder and her vagina. This left her incontinent and in the doctor’s words: “aside from death, this was about the worst accident that could have happened to the poor young girl”. [Many women in third world countries, particularly in Africa, continue to suffer this appalling, life-changing condition]
It was only once Dr Sims worked out a way of getting better access to the vaginal area through the Sims speculum and the ‘Sims Position’ (lying on the left side) that he realized that maybe something could be done. He ‘took over’ Anarcha, as well as a number of other enslaved girls with the same condition, and began experimenting without consent (she was enslaved, after all) and worse still anaesthetic! Anarcha endured 30 surgeries. Ironically, Dr Sims is the one who is celebrated as the ‘father of gynecology’ with his women ‘subjects’ largely unrecognized as the ‘mothers of gynecology’ until recently.
Missing in the Amazon (Guardian) In June 2002 a Guardian journalist, Dom Phillips and an indigenous expert on uncontacted and recently contacted indigenous Amazonian tribes, were murdered. It garnered a lot of attention, probably because Phillips was British, because indigenous rights activists and environmentalists have long been in danger on the Amazon. This is a six-part series published by the Guardian, and pleasingly, the episodes only go for about 1/2 an hour (just the right length!) Episode 1: the disappearance starts with the search for their boat and bodies on the Javari River in the Vale do Javari in western Brazil, right in the middle of South America, near the borders of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. It’s supposedly an indigenous-only zone, but it is a notorious route for drug-trafficking, and illegal mining, fishing and logging. Episode 2: The Journalist and the President looks at Dom Phillips, who started off as a music journalist and ended up being a freelance journalist working all over the world. He had become particularly interested in Brazilian politics and economic and cultural development, and was married to a Brazilian woman and lived in Brazil. When Jair Bolsonaro came to power in 2019 he gave the green light to many illegal activities on indigenous land, and 2 billion trees were lopped during his presidency. Terrible man.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 