The Most Isolated City in the World - An Elective Spent in Critical Care at the Royal Perth Hospital, Western Australia

Abstract This paper explores the figurative expression of emotion in Gija, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from the East Kimberley in Western Australia. As in many Australian languages, Gija displays a large number of metaphors of emotion where miscellaneous body parts – frequently, the belly – contribute to the figurative representation of emotions. In addition, in Gija certain verbal constructions describe the experience of emotion via metaphors of physical impact or damage. This second profile of metaphors is far less widespread, in Australia and elsewhere in the world, and has also attracted far fewer descriptions. This article explores both types of metaphors in turn. Body-based metaphors will be discussed first, and we will highlight the specificity of Gija in this respect, so as to offer data that can be compared to other languages, in Australia and elsewhere. The second part of the article will present verbal metaphors. Given that this phenomenon is not yet very well undersood, this account aims to take a first step into documenting a previously unexplored domain in the language thereby contributing to the broader typology that this issue forms a part of. Throughout the text, we also endeavour to connect the discussion of metaphors with local representations and understanding of emotions.

Download Full-text

Goolarabooloo Futures: Mining and Aborigines in Northwest Australia

The Postcolonial Contemporary ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823280063.003.0010 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 208-223

Author(s):

Stephen Muecke

Keyword(s):

State Government ◽

Western Australia ◽

Science And Technology ◽

The State ◽

Ethnographic Study ◽

Mining Companies ◽

The World ◽

Multinational Mining Companies ◽

Liquefied Gas ◽

Northwest Australia

In our apparently postcolonial age, colonization is proceeding apace in Goolarabooloo country near Broome in Western Australia where sovereignty has never been ceded, and no treaty ratified. The colonial ‘settler’ economy was established in the late 19th century with the pearling and pastoral industries, but today it is multinational mining companies (‘extraction colonialism’) that are extending their reach with the urging of the State government and even some Aboriginal agencies. This ethnographic study describes two ‘worlds’: Those (the ‘Moderns’) who like to see themselves as ‘naturally’ extending the territory of a universalist modernity via their institutions of science and technology, governmental organisation, the law and the economy. Under scrutiny, this world turns out to be less robust institutionally and conceptually than it pretends to be; it operates with fantasies, blunders, poor planning, little negotiation and waste. Often it works, but in the instance of the four-year struggle between Woodside Energy and the Goolarabooloo, the latter was able to resist the former’s desire to build a liquefied gas plant on their traditional land. Woodside and its partners left with billions of dollars wasted in the effort. The ‘world’ of the Indigenous Goolarabooloo is the second group of institutions my extended ethnography will describe.

Download Full-text

Maternal critical care

Oxford Textbook of Medicine ◽

10.1093/med/9780198746690.003.0281 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 2701-2705

Author(s):

Rupert Gauntlett

Keyword(s):

Critical Care ◽

Critical Illness ◽

Death Rate ◽

Critical Care Unit ◽

Post Partum ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

The World ◽

Resource Poor ◽

Acute Fatty Liver

Critical illness during pregnancy or after giving birth is rare: in the United Kingdom 0.29% of maternities involve admission to a critical care unit, and the maternal death rate is 0.01%. Over 80% of obstetric admissions to critical care occur in the post-partum phase, mainly due to complications relating to massive haemorrhage. Other pregnancy specific conditions that may require critical care support include pre-eclampsia (typically when diagnosis and treatment have been delayed), amniotic fluid embolism, peri-partum cardiomyopathy, and acute fatty liver of pregnancy. Puerperal sepsis remains a major problem in resource-poor parts of the world. Pregnant women who survive critical illness may be particularly prone to long-term psychological morbidity. It is vital that, once physiological stability has been achieved, no time is wasted before a mother is reunited with her baby.

Download Full-text

Should critical care doctors be part of the cardiac arrest call team?

British Journal of Hospital Medicine ◽

10.12968/hmed.2019.0305 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 81 (2) ◽

pp. 1-2

Author(s):

Maxime T Rigaudy ◽

Feras Tomalieh ◽

Sanya Caratella

Keyword(s):

Cardiac Arrest ◽

Critical Care ◽

Financial Constraints ◽

The World ◽

The Uk ◽

Cardiac Arrest Team ◽

Resuscitation Team

The composition of the cardiac arrest team varies widely both throughout the UK and the world. There are no agreed standards regarding the composition of the resuscitation team, and variety in teams is often dictated by availability of staff and financial constraints. This article discusses the evidence for and against the inclusion of critical care doctors on the cardiac arrest call team.

Download Full-text

Demographic science aids in understanding the spread and fatality rates of COVID-19

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.2004911117 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 117 (18) ◽

pp. 9696-9698 ◽

Cited By ~ 186

Author(s):

Jennifer Beam Dowd ◽

Liliana Andriano ◽

David M. Brazel ◽

Valentina Rotondi ◽

Per Block ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Critical Care ◽

South Korea ◽

Age Structure ◽

Care Needs ◽

Age Composition ◽

The World ◽

Specific Mortality ◽

Population Sizes ◽

Age And Sex

Governments around the world must rapidly mobilize and make difficult policy decisions to mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Because deaths have been concentrated at older ages, we highlight the important role of demography, particularly, how the age structure of a population may help explain differences in fatality rates across countries and how transmission unfolds. We examine the role of age structure in deaths thus far in Italy and South Korea and illustrate how the pandemic could unfold in populations with similar population sizes but different age structures, showing a dramatically higher burden of mortality in countries with older versus younger populations. This powerful interaction of demography and current age-specific mortality for COVID-19 suggests that social distancing and other policies to slow transmission should consider the age composition of local and national contexts as well as intergenerational interactions. We also call for countries to provide case and fatality data disaggregated by age and sex to improve real-time targeted forecasting of hospitalization and critical care needs.

Download Full-text