Moving into college and studying the history of medicine ( part I)

I remember it fairly clearly, my first day in Oxford. The bus from the airport went over Magdalen bridge and I panicked big time. Then I somehow found my way to St Cross some 10 minutes walking from the bus station with my two suitcases. The junior dean received me, since it was a Saturday, and there was no one else in the office to give me my key and just generally introduce me to the place. He very rightly guessed that on a Saturday, just landed from a transatlantic, I wouldn't have access to a bank account and lent me 20 pounds to make it to Monday. Bizarrely I don't remember his name but I do remember the name of the other dean, Morgan. Once the hectic moments of settling in had passed the panic returned. WTH was I doing there and how was I going to survive???? So I called the one friend I had in the place, Ruben, a guy I had met years before in London and who had started his doctorate the year before. He took me to this Chinese place, we got take out and ate in the MCR at his college. Ruben managed to make me feel at home and panic a bit less about the impending classes. I was two weeks late because of visa problems and had not actually read the things sent to me. I had also forgotten that I had signed up to give a presentation that very week. Of this I was reminded that first Monday by my tutor who fully expected me- jet-lagged, unprepared, panicked me- to give that presentation on the following day during his class. 

That Sunday I had made my way to what became my safe haven and home during my time at Oxford, the Catholic Chaplaincy, and instantly felt at ease. That English way of taking you as you are making itself clear and welcoming from the very beginning. I remember my time at Oxford as a very joyful one, it was busy, stressful, at high speed, filled with adrenaline the entire time with only a week or so at Easter to really rest, I was so happy. 

Studying the history of medicine at Oxford is intense and very fun. The programme covers the entire development of medicine in a short period of time. A lot of individual reading and work was expected of us. The start was rocky but my classmates helped me catch-up and somehow the presentation did go well thought it was improvised. It was the first time I was exposed to Charles Rosenberg and his influential work Framing Disease. The way in which society identifies and experiences disease makes that disease come alive in a way that it in itself will not. For my electives I chose disease, medicine, and society in South Asia and in the Americas. It of course was quite influenced by Rosenberg and studying the context of society's role in the defining of medicine. For my dissertation I focused on dengue fever and the production of knowledge about it. It explored how the exchange of information, mainly through letters, led to a new way of identifying disease commonalities and developing a unified body of information about dengue fever. Dengue fever, to this day without a vaccine, is rarely deadly and can be contracted in most tropical countries of the world. The cure is to wait it out while the symptoms are treated with paracetamol in most cases. It was initially confused with yellow fever and malaria and there was much debate about whether or not it was transmitted through something in the environment. This is an example of one of the interesting things about developments in medicine during the 19th century, doctors would often reach almost totally correct conclusions about a disease but often through the most bizarre and circumspect paths imaginable. Like thinking it was the smells from stagnant water that led to dengue, they were right that stagnant water was important, just not the smell of it. Also it is clean stagnant water not putrified stagnant water, but hey they were heading in the right direction.

While I can't remember each detail of my programme I do remember the dark humour we all developed during the course and this rather comfortable coexistence with diseased bodies and death. 

I would do it again in a heartbeat.