Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Public Health Humor

I finished two days so far of the Biomedicine class and even though I learned from my reading last night that there are no pain receptors in the brain, my brain hurts. Yes, I defy science. The class has been fairly straightforward. We read a section, discuss it with our assigned groups, take a quiz, hear a lecture by different Hopkins researchers on a topic related to the section. This happens twice a day... making for a very long day... with about five hours of reading at night.

Thankfully, a good chunk of the learning comes from group discussion. We're teaching ourselves basically, which I like. Listening to hours of power point lectures in the dark is a sure-fire recipe for nappy time for Jackie. Here we only have two separate hours of lecture and so far they've been pretty interesting (i.e today we heard one lecture about neurological effects of HIV and one on spinal muscular atrophy) . We're moving pretty fast, (learning the nervous system in two days), but it's basically so we are familiar with the terms by the end of the two week. Even still, there's a lot of shit to know...

But onto the good part! The professor/doctor who's running the class apparently discovered the concept of autoimmunity. (There are some very hitters at Hopkins... and they are not shy about reminding us that across the street is the world's best hospital). So, on the first day as I was getting up for break, I asked this doctor whether it was okay for us to leave our computers at out seats during lunch... and he said that it was fine, but "don't leave them overnight because the cleaning people think that everything in this building is infected with AIDS and they won't clean anywhere near anything that's left." Wait. Did the grandfather of autoimmunity just make an AIDS joke? I think he did! (Okay, we're defining "joke" loosely here)... But still, are AIDS jokes fair game even at public health school? I tried one out later on my classmates... oops! It wasn't really a joke but I was talking about what I want to do (combine entertainment and health communications), I gave the example, "you know, try to make AIDS funny." Crickets. Yeah, apparently, not funny. I got a lot of eye rolls and gasps... no laughs. It made me miss the good ol days of working in television, where AIDS is hilarious! Oh well. Maybe I'll become humorless, too, eventually. Or just more sensitive. But, I hope not.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

you can always go and try out the jokes at the bank. ha ha

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