Month: April 2017
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Thomas Hodgkin: the limits of idealism
Kirtan NautiyalHouston, Texas, United States 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 justice with a wider…
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The Friends’ Ambulance Unit South Bank Clinic: The forgotten valor of the pacifists who stayed beyond the fight
Christopher MagoonPhiladelphia, PA, USA 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 of volunteer fighter pilots known as the Flying Tigers still enjoys rockstar levels of fame in China. This…
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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 DakinNorth London, UK 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 houses, with occasional trips to New York or the French Riviera. This was the world Wodehouse…
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Love, cancer, and the caregiver’s faith of C.S. Lewis
Joshua NiforatosCleveland, Ohio, United States 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 life. During the Second World War, Lewis had numerous broadcast talks that made his voice second only…
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Ernest Black Struthers: missionary life, kala azar, and military strife
Peter KopplinToronto, Canada 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 (visceral leishmaniasis). Most North American physicians…
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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 SchroederDes Moines, Iowa, United States 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 of a long series of night-shifts. The anticipation,…
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Locked-in syndrome: Inside the cocoon
Anika KhanKarachi, 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) In December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a massive stroke that made him a prisoner in his own body.1 Within the space of a few hours, his hectic, animated existence…