Month: April 2017
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Thomas Hodgkin: the limits of idealism
Kirtan Nautiyal Houston, Texas, United States Thomas Hodgkin Thomas Hodgkin was born in 1798 into a middle class Quaker family then residing in Pentonville, a village north of London. His father was a private tutor and Hodgkin’s early education was also conducted at home, balancing instruction in the Quaker tenets of simplicity and social…
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The Friends’ Ambulance Unit South Bank Clinic: the forgotten valor of the pacifists who stayed beyond the fight
Christopher Magoon Philadelphia, PA, USA FAU volunteer labels unit truck Unit leader, Jack Jones, sketches scene of locals in common room For many of the non-Chinese volunteers who aided China during the tumult of the 1930s and 40s, a notoriety that borders on mythology remains to this day. Perhaps most famously, an American group…
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Mozart’s “effect” on us: A review of an aspect of music and cognition
Vincent de LuiseNew Haven, Connecticut, United States For decades, neuroscientists have explored whether there exists a causal relationship between listening to music and enhancement of cognitive ability. Does music make one smarter? Can listening to music lead to more memory and greater intellect? Does listening specifically to the music of Wolfgang Mozart improve cognitive ability?…
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Sir Roderick Glossop: Wodehouse’s “eminent loony doctor”
Paul Dakin North London, UK Sir Roderick Glossop (right) and J Washburn Stoker appear in court following Jeeves’ intervention P.G. Wodehouse is one of the greatest comic authors of the twentieth century. He wrote nearly a hundred books containing a fascinating array of characters. Many inhabited the confined geography of 1920’s London and country…
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Love, cancer, and the caregiver’s faith of C.S. Lewis
Joshua Niforatos Cleveland, Ohio, United States Author C.S. Lewis wears a bathrobe in his house. Photo by © Norman Parkinson Poi se torno all’ eternal fontana. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto XXXI C.S. Lewis, the medieval and Renaissance scholar of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, wrote prolifically on myriad topics and won international recognition early in…
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Ernest Black Struthers: missionary life, kala azar, and military strife
Peter Kopplin Toronto, Canada Kala azar disease In 1934 the third edition of Cecil’s A Textbook of Medicine contained a chapter by an academically obscure missionary in China.1 Russell Cecil, still editing the book by himself with only the help of a neurology colleague, chose Ernest Black Struthers to write about kala azar…
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Sir Samuel Wilks (1824–1911)
Sir Samuel Wilks was one of the most influential English general physicians of the second half of the nineteenth century. He was a careful clinician and an accomplished investigator, always trying to correlate clinical and pathology findings. Author of seven books and fifteen separate articles or pamphlets, he wrote some 450 papers, including one defending…
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William Babington
William Hazlitt, in one of his many essays that used to be inflicted on long-suffering schoolchildren, reminded his readers that “posterity are by no means as disinterested as they are supposed to be. They give their gratitude and admiration only in return for benefits conferred. They cherish the memory of those to whom they are…
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Night shift
Andrew Schroeder Des Moines, Iowa, United States Ready to help by Andrew Schroeder My first overnight shift as a third-year medical student in the Emergency Department: the nervous anticipation had been building all afternoon. Of course nothing really tangible separates a day-shift from a night-shift, except perhaps a feeling of well-restedness by the end…
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Locked-in syndrome: Inside the cocoon
Anika Khan Karachi, Pakistan “…what will you carry back from this field trip into my endless solitude?” From The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (1997) Jean-Dominique Bauby “dictating” the passages of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly that he had earlier revised in his head. Photograph by Jeanloup Sieff. In December 1995,…