Year: 2018
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Child’s play and art
Bojana CokícZajecar, Serbia Childhood is an important time of learning and development. Play is the work of childhood, affecting sensorimotor, cognitive, emotional, moral, and social development.1 Children have always played.3 Throughout history, children’s games have changed with the social environment. In past centuries, children’s play began in the evening, on the street, after girls had helped…
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Illness or intoxication? Diagnosing a French clown
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, USA In his day, Thomas Couture was a renowned history painter, though his students would later surpass him in fame—the likes of Edouard Manet and John Lafarge. Born in the small French town of Senlis, his parents moved to Paris when he was a child so he could study art. He attended…
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Ibn Rushd (Averroes), medieval polymath
It is hard to know what to make of someone who has written books on philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, law, and linguistics. In our time this would have been impossible. Not so in medieval Andalusia, where Ibn Rushd, now best known under his Latinized name of Averroes, never missed a day reading or writing…
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Jean Cruveilhier – first described the lesions of multiple sclerosis
Jean Cruveilhier was born in 1791 in Limoges, France, the son of a military surgeon. He had intended to become a priest but changed his mind at the insistence of his father and became a doctor, graduating from the University of Paris in 1816. In 1823 he was appointed professor of surgery at the University of…
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Van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of “animalcules”
George DuneaChicago Illinois, United States “I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort. . . had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The…
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here
Slavena Salve NissanNew York, New York, United States this is the third time this week a baby girl in a pink hatwith her grandfatherin the lobby of the cancer building me at the table next to themtuna sandwich unwrappedbut suddenly not hungry i know why they’re here he whispers things to hera lullaby?an i love…
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Jean Marie Poiseuille: Physics and mathematics
Son of a carpenter, Jean Marie Poiseuille was born in Paris in 1799 and began his studies in physics and mathematics in 1815. When the school was disbanded for political reasons he switched to medicine and after graduating opened a practice in Paris. He became a member of the Academy of Medicine in Paris, later…
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Carl Ludwig, pioneer in human physiology
Carl Ludwig (1816 -1895), one of the greatest physiologists of the nineteenth century, made important contributions to a variety of disciplines. An activist in his youth, he found it necessary at one stage to switch medical schools; and also while a student became interested in fencing, which accounts for a prominent scar on his upper…
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Food of the body
Katrina GenuisVancouver, Canada Two thousand years ago, the Roman writer Valerius Maximus documented a particularly strange set of events. In his collection Memorable Doings and Sayings, Maximus recounts thousands of episodes of exemplary Roman behavior. One of these is the tale of a woman, Pero, and her father, Myco (also called Cimon). In the brief…