Month: April 2019
-
Dressing the General
Rebecca SingerChicago, Illinois, United States “Rebecca, can you help me with a dressing change?” Clarence, the nurse and secessionist fighter, asked from the doorway of the room where we were being held. He made it sound like a request, yet the tall, lanky fighter flanking him with the hunting rifle casually pointed in my direction…
-
Hammond, Lincoln, and the emergence of American neurology
Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.– William Shakespeare Shakespeare’s words describe the extraordinary life of William Alexander Hammond.1-8 LC McHenry, a historian of neurology, dubbed Hammond…
-
Dialogues of comfort
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece My patient is a veteran physician, quite advanced in years but mentally lucid and fully aware of his condition. His disease is incurable, and he is in need of a chest aspiration for symptomatic relief of his breathlessness. He is also impatient. “How much fluid have you drawn?” he asks gruffly every…
-
Nils Alwall—One of the founding fathers of nephrology
Mårten SegelmarkLund, Sweden More than two million people suffering from kidney failure are currently being kept alive by dialysis. But when Nils Alwall was a young doctor eighty years ago, medicine had little to offer to the patients with kidney diseases other than bed rest and tasteless diets, measures that only added new burdens to…
-
The professor and the playwright on what it means to care
Fergus ShanahanWilton, Cork, Ireland Illness words are seldom simple. They can hurt or heal in different contexts or change their meaning over time. Nor are they always understood the same way by patients and doctors. Borrowing from Philip Larkin, it is “difficult to find words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not…
-
Taking the bat out of Hell
Tajri SalekBirmingham, UK “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”― Bram Stoker, Dracula If you ever trek through the dense undergrowth of the Borneo rainforests, you will eventually get to a clearing where monkey song and colorful epiphytes give way to the gigantic rocky face of Deer Cave. If you…
-
Medicine in the afterlife – The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Maureen HirthlerBradenton, Florida, United States “And therefore shall I neither be borne away, nor carried by force to the East to take part in the festivals of the fiends; nor shall there be given unto me cruel gashes with knives, nor shall I be shut in on every side, nor gored by the horns of…
-
Bones and Bots: what classic science fiction tells us about contemporary medicine
Greg BeattyBellingham, Washington, United States In the original Star Trek, the real Star Trek, there were several major recurring characters. There was of course James Tiberius Kirk, Captain of the Enterprise, the ever conflicted Vulcan first officer Mr. Spock, the charmingly clichéd Scottish engineer “Scotty,” and of course the chief medical officer Dr. Leonard “Bones”…