Month: May 2017
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Which weighs upon the heart
Murad Khan Karachi, Pakistan Painting by Nisar Ahmed I seldom see patients without an appointment, which for an initial patient can take up to an hour, often longer. Fortunately for this couple, the booked patient rang in to say he could not come because of some transport problem, so I was able to see…
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At the turning point
Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece Eva was born the year I entered medical school; our life paths would cross two decades later. She went through school, played volleyball regularly, married, and lived a normal and carefree life. Then in her early twenties she gradually began getting breathless and increasingly tired, and had dizzy spells, fainting…
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The divine leaf: physick and the cause for physick
Lynn Veach Sadler Burlington, NC, United States The photograph is of John White’s 1585 watercolor of a Secotan mother and child now in the British Library. Columbus is believed to have rebuked his crew for sharing the Indians’ “drinking” of the smoke of tobacco through toboca/tobaga pipes and chewing its dried leaves. He was among…
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Charite hospital
Annabelle Slingerland Leiden, the Netherlands On November 14, 1709, King Frederik I of Prussia planted a small seed that over the following three centuries grew, branch by branch, into one of the foremost medical research and treatment centers in the world. Plague House, 1709 The Plague, later Almshouse, Matthäus Seutter (1678-1757), circa 1740…
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The flu vaccine: transparency, uncertainty, and trust in medicine
Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece Sailing for the Holy Mountain from Ouranoupolis, Greece A few years ago the fear of ‘pandemic flu’ was spread widely all over the world, causing what has been termed an “emotional epidemic.”1 The disease itself, its social dimensions, and the ways it was publicly handled could form the subject for an…
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The girl on the gurney
Diana Pi Westlake, Ohio, United States Scene in the New York morgue. (Public Domain) A month before my gig as senior medical resident at Bellevue Hospital was up, I spent a morning in the New York City morgue. Why? I lost a patient. A young man with end-stage AIDS, a prisoner from Rikers Island.…
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How a bishop unwittingly kick-started the DNA revolution
William Kingston Dublin, Ireland Ewald, Born, Heitler & Schrodinger 1943, outside 65 Merrion Square (then home of STP). Courtesy of DIAS. E. Schrodinger, 1955. Courtesy of the Irish Press. In 1943 a series of lectures was delivered in Trinity College, Dublin, which had profound scientific and medical consequences. Their title was What is Life?…
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Outsourced clinical trials and ethical implications: India the most preferred global clinical trial hub
Persis NaumannPittsburg, Pennsylvania Introduction Pharmaceutical research is a complex social enterprise. With the proliferation of corporate globalization in the healthcare industry, pharmaceutical companies from western developed countries have increasingly offshored and outsourced global biopharmaceutical clinical trials to developing countries. The power of global pharmaceutical industries is extensive. It is important to understand the structure of…
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Nutritional disruption in the Marshall Islands
Carley Trentman Kansas, United States When one mentions World War II, vivid images come to mind. The controversial decision to use the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the end of the war in 1945. Subsequent testing of hydrogen bombs occurred in the 1950s on the Marshall Islands, where “Ivy Mike” and “Castle…