Month: March 2017
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Pantaleon or Pantaleimon—A most noble physician
Maria MonteiroPorto, Portugal As information about the life of Saint Pantaleon is entangled with tradition, it difficult to distinguish myth from facts. Nevertheless, according to several sources, Pantaleon was born c. AD 275, son of the rich pagan Eustorgius of Nicomedia. His name means “a lion in everything.” Later he would be renamed Pantaleímon (from…
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About face: From revulsion to compassion
Sylvia R. KarasuNew York City, New York, United States “I was too ugly to go to school,” writes Lucy Grealy in her painful memoir Autobiography of a Face.1 At the age of nine, Grealy was diagnosed with a rare Ewing’s sarcoma of her jaw that necessitated disfiguring surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. “I was my face,”…
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Hume and autism-causing vaccines
Trevor KleeCambridge, Massachusetts, United States In 1998 the British medical researcher Andrew Wakefield announced a startling discovery in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet. He had found that the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine seemed to have caused both bowel disease and autism in children.1 This was startling because the MMR vaccine…
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Frances Oldham Kelsey: A medical profile in courage
Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, United States Her name has disappeared into the vault of medical history and her dedication to scientific rigor and patient safety has been largely forgotten. Yet her silent but tangible legacy continues to this day. Born in Canada in 1914, Frances Oldham Kelsey received a BSc (1934) and MSc (1935) in…
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Waiting for results
Susan AndersonMadison, Wisconsin, United States You do not realize you have been holding your breath for weeks, until you see the new email hinting the results are in. You do not realize the tension you are feeling because you have put all feelings about “The Medical Situation” on hold, waiting for results. You do not…
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A year in oblivion – an artistic journey
Mara BuckWindsor, Maine, United States My grandmother had a saying, “What is, is. What ain’t, ain’t.” Simplistic to the core, but truth often is just that. Her saying did not apply to cancer because cancer did not run in our family. That is, not before me. It has been a couple decades since my breast…
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Mixing medicine – Religion and science
Aneesa BodiatSouth Africa The ameer chewed on the dry date my husband had presented to him, saying a prayer and then placing the chewed fruit back into the container, sealing it for use in a few days when my baby boy would be born. This particular ameer or religious leader was from Medina, the holy…
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Music and the brain
Rayda JoomunMauritius Music brings a smile to our faces. Yet this abstract entity has no conventional defining criteria. Proust acknowledged this: “Music helped me to descend into myself, to discover new things; the variety that I had sought in vain in life, in travel, but for a longing which was nonetheless renewed in me by…
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Was the Mozart Effect evident before the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?
Harishnath RamachandranEngland, United Kingdom “Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.” – Plato The word music is derived from the Greek word “mousike”, meaning art of the muses. It is considered a form of entertainment combining a collection of sounds to form pleasurable tunes. A large chunk of the music…