Month: April 2018
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Retirement reflections: from code to compassion with Chloe
Gregory RuteckiCleveland, Ohio, United States William May and Samuel Shem have described inadequacies of doctor-patient relationships that are characterized as code models.1,2 May observed that these medical codes binding patients and their physicians together shape relationships similar to habits or rules, are aesthetic, and value style over compassion. Shem wrote The House of God when these…
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Jules Amar (1879–1935). A method to help soldiers who were amputated or mutilated during the First World War reintegrate society
Philippe CampilloZiad Joseph RahalFrance Jules Amar (1879–1935) may not be well known in medical texts, but his work helped initiate two important scientific disciplines: the physiology of work and ergonomics. In The performance of the human machine: research on work (1909)1 Amar wrote of the need for a biological analysis of social life, especially that…
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She was even in love with you
Stewart MassadSt. Louis, Missouri, USA Francis Delisle was coming out of Bard’s TrueValue Hardware with ant bait in a paper bag when he saw Marty Van Etten coming up Main Street. Marty’s wife Anne had died at winter’s end, only forty-seven, from glioblastoma, after surgery in Baltimore, radiation in New Haven, chemotherapy in New York.…
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Percy’s last day
Shampa SinhaTasmania, Australia Percy missed his regular train that morning, the one that would have given him a comfortable half-hour cushion between his arrival at the station and “knife-to-skin” time at the operating theatre. He felt his anxiety levels rising within him like bile as the train neared the hospital. He was generally of a…
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The Terme Boxer’s trauma
Seth JudsonLos Angeles, California, United States The cavernous eyes of the Terme Boxer look at me with the same anguish and exhaustion that has intrigued archaeologists and art historians since the boxer was first unearthed in Rome over a century ago. Experts date the bronze sculpture back to the third century BCE, and many have…
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Saints on trial
Michael ShulmanNew Hope, Pennsylvania, United States There is an irresistible sub-genre of literature devoted to the moral takedown of saints and would-be saints, and it has brought forth contributions from some of the masters of English prose. One thinks especially of George Orwell’s portrait of Gandhi (“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are…
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My mother and Proust
Dean GianakosLynchburg, Virginia, United States “Mom, one day I’m going to write a story about you. I’ve already picked out a title: “My Mother and Proust,” I laugh. I look at her face, hoping for a smile. Before my eighty-six-year-old mother developed Parkinson’s dementia a few years ago, she would have laughed with me. Instead,…
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Healthcare for the popes
Guy de Chauliac was the personal physician of three of the seven popes forced to reside in Avignon during their so-called Babylonian captivity. Although he wrote a famous textbook on surgery, he practiced mainly as a physician, and reportedly wielded the knife mainly to embalm the bodies of dead popes but was careful to avoid…
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“The Grasshopper” by Chekhov: folly and regrets
Diphtheria in the days of writers such as Chekhov and Goncharov was a common disease that spread death and devastation across the wide expanse of the Russian Empire. It could kill its victims by its toxic effects on the heart but more often suffocated them with a grayish white membrane in their throat and nasal…