Day: January 30, 2017
-
The boys’ club
Laura HirshbeinMichigan, Ann Arbor, United States In 1914, a group of fraternity men from the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, decided they needed more influence at the school. One of the students had an uncle on the faculty, and with his connections these men founded the Galens Honorary Medical Society, an…
-
Oaths, codes, and charters in medicine over the ages
L.J. SandlowChicago, Illinois, USA Introduction Medical oaths are solemn pledges taken by medical students as they complete their training and enter the practice of medicine. Oaths and codes summarize the profession’s mission to protect and restore human health. Taking an oath is the hallmark of a physician’s commitment to his profession. Present in all the major…
-
“Uncertain disease”: The science of nostalgia
Kevis GoodmanBerkeley, California, USA William Cullen, the well-esteemed Edinburgh physician and professor of medicine at Glasgow and later Edinburgh, shared the “love of system” praised by no less than Adam Smith, who—not coincidentally—happened to be Cullen’s patient and friend.1 Cullen set out to gather all existing medical nosologies (the disease classifications that imitated Linnaean botanical…
-
“And of scurvy the teeth fall out of them”
Katarina VillnerStockholm, Sweden And of scurvy the teeth fall out of them;for scurvy and throat diseases I have used lemonsas long I had any left, for as soon as I came downI bought 200 lemons from a Dutch ship and he had no more.1 Henrik Fleming, a Swedish nobleman, wrote the above quotation in a…
-
Illness shapes the course of human events
K.N. LaiHong Kong, China These items, part of the Gerald Chow Memorial Lecture delivered to the Hong Kong College of Physicians, illustrate the many connections between medicine and the humanities, as well as exemplifying how illness shapes the course of human events and how even mild congenital anomalies may have catastrophic outcomes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt…
-
Dame Cicely Saunders and the foundation of the hospice movement
Julie SilvermanSeattle, Washington, United States “Many doctors nowadays, when the death of their patients becomes imminent, seem to believe that it is quite proper to leave the dying in the care of the nurses and the sorrowing relatives,” lamented Dr. Alfred Worcester in 1935, “This shifting of responsibility is un-pardonable.”1 Then as now, abandoning patients…
-
The remarkable Baldwin IV: Leper and king of Jerusalem
John TurnerAintree, Liverpool, United Kingdom The young King Baldwin Medieval teen king, precocious politician, and successful battlefield commander, Baldwin IV not only surmounted disabling neurological impairment but challenged the stigma of leprosy, remarkably continuing to rule until his premature death aged twenty-three. His coronation as sixth king of Jerusalem at age thirteen coincided with the…
-
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?: Erzsébet Báthory and the curative power of blood in medieval Europe
Joanna SmolenskiNew York, United States If the body is seen either as enclosed and filled with blood, or as vulnerable and bleeding, then blood can also only be interpreted either as life (when it fills the intact body) or as death (when it has left the body). (Bildhauer 2006: 5) In medieval Europe, blood played…
-
Revisiting a medical classic
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Théophile Alajouanine delivered the Harveian Lecture to the Harveian Society of London on March 17, 1948. It was published in the journal Brain in September 1948 and became a medical classic, most frequently cited in papers devoted to the neurology of musical creativity and to the illness of one…