Doctors are, sometimes, fascinated by scrotums and by strawberries. Studying scrotal symmetry – or its lack – yielded an Ig Nobel prize in 2002. As discussed on this blog previously, the strawberry is used extensively as an analogy in medical practice. The scrotum and strawberry have a lot in common, for example, their distinctive skins. The […]
About: Gwinyai Masukume
- Website
- http://foodmedicaleponyms.blogspot.com/
- Profile
- Cuisine Research Institute (CRI) GRAPE (Group for Research and Advancement of Palatable Eponyms)
Posts by Gwinyai Masukume:
Creatures that present poo to their girlfriends as a gift
If you are in Johannesburg this week, you can hear details about the ways a male is judged by the size of his balls, if that male is a dung beetle. It is not uncommon for male dung beetles to obtain sexual favors from females by presenting them with a ball of crap. But of course […]
‘Culinary terms are used to describe genitals colloquially’
A quartet from Washington and San Francisco writes, in the American Journal of Medicine: “Although culinary terms are used to describe genitals colloquially, medical terminology has avoided such comparisons.” Dr Nicholas Mark and his colleagues survey the medical literature on diagnostic clues in urine, stool, sputum, etc. that — in at least some respect — resemble drink […]
Medicine is sprinkled with metaphorical crumbs
My colleague Lisa Kipersztok (a final-year medical student at Tufts University) and I (Gwinyai Masukume, at the University of the Witwatersrand) have collected and arranged a new feast of medical food metaphors. We follow in the footsteps of hungry giants. In the late 1970s Terry and Hanchard in their seminal paper, titled “Gastrology: the use of culinary terms in […]