Month: January 2019
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Byzantine physicians
Greek physicians dominated medicine for almost two thousand years, beginning with the school of Hippocrates, of Herophilus and Erasistratus in Alexandria, and continuing after the Roman conquest. Celsus and Galen were in Rome; Dioscorides was in the Roman army during the reign of the Emperor Nero. Aretaeus of Cappadocia practiced sometime during the second century.…
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William Withering and the use of foxglove in pediatric patients
Göran WettrellSweden William Withering’s An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses was published in 1785.1 The book received great attention and was the result of several years of clinical observations. On the title page, Withering chose a quotation from the Ars Poetica of Horace: nonumque permatur in annum, “let it be suppressed…
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Washington and his spectacles
Ronald FishmanChicago, Illinois, United States After accepting the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, Washington took most of the Continental Army back up to the Northeast to cover the main British army based around New York City. In the winter of 1782-1783, with the peace negotiations going on in Paris, the encampment was located…
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Reading the brain in John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche”
Kathryne DycusMadrid, Spain The Romantic poet John Keats wrote in a letter dated May 18, 1818, “I am glad at not having given away my medical books, which I shall look over again to keep alive the little I knew towards that work.”1 Though the Romantic poet abandoned a career in medicine, the knowledge he…
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Psychological preparation for war: Early life experiences
Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States I suspect that few early life experiences fully prepare one psychologically for the realities of war. Mine certainly did not. However, my introduction to post-traumatic stress and moral injury, frequent war sequelae, occurred at home while I was growing up. When I was nine years old, my younger brother…
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A very interesting case
Anjiya SulaimanKarachi, Pakistan By my fourth year of medical school I had learned to distill patients into a pure clinical form. Individual characteristics are routinely and expertly tweezed and condensed into an intricate framework of pathology, pharmacology, and medical jargon: we call them “cases.” I met S during my first week of an inpatient pediatric…
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They would rather go alone
Kera MorrisDenver, Colorado, USA Dad had been in and out of hospice for years. It had not occurred to me that you could go into hospice and come out on your own two feet, but it was apparently the case. When I got the last call about Dad having an episode and needing to go…
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Sir George Frederick Still (1868-1941): the constant pediatrician
Joseph deBettencourtChicago, Illinois, United States Coursing through the heart of Salisbury, a historic cathedral city in Wiltshire, England, are a number of clear and cool rivers. The water of these rivers runs through layers of chalk bedrock, purifying and alkalizing the water. These rivers emerge as springs, percolating through the rock and running down the…