Month: March 2020
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Albert Einstein headed off at the “Nobel pass” by Alvar Gullstrand
Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States Allvar Gullstrand was a brilliant ophthalmologist and the second of eleven surgeons who have received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was awarded the prize in 1911 “for his work on the dioptrics of the eye.”1 A self-taught mathematician, he calculated the path of light through the layers…
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The Dutch anatomy lessons
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom The Hellenistic anatomist Herophilus (c. 330–c. 260 BC) and the physiologist Erasistratus (c. 325–c. 250 BC) were granted limited permission to dissect executed criminals with consent of the first Ptolemaic Pharaohs. This practice, essential for anatomical study, was then suppressed by ancient Greek taboos regarding purity, death, and cutting the…
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Hiroshima seventy-five years after the bombing
Cristóbal Berry-CabánFort Bragg, North Carolina, United States “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in…
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William Cheselden, father of modern British surgery
William Cheselden was the most eminent English surgeon of the first half of the eighteenth century.1,2 Born in Leicestershire in 1688 just two weeks before William of Orange landed in England, he learned Greek and Latin at school, then was apprenticed to a local barber-surgeon. At fifteen he went to London and was again apprenticed,…
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Gerard Blasius (1627–1682)
Gerard Blaes (Blasius) was a Dutch physician and anatomist, famous for his work on the spinal cord and for one of his students discovering the parotid (Stensen’s) duct. As a young man he had lived and studied in Copenhagen, where his father was architect to the king of Denmark. When his father died, his family returned…
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“A Veritable Angel of Mercy”: the sardonic representation of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Mariella ScerriMellieha, Malta Critical acclaim and popular opinion have elevated Kesey’s first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest published in 1962, to something of a modern classic, much read and written about as well as adapted for film. The novel is narrated in the first person by the half-Indian Chief Bromden, one of the patients…
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Antonio Benivieni, early anatomist and pathologist
The Florentine Antonio Benivieni dissected corpses and recorded his findings some seventy years before Andreas Vesalius and even more so before Batista Morgagni. Yet though he has been called the “founder of pathology,” he never achieved the fame and recognition accorded to his distinguished successors. He was the eldest of five sons in an ancient…
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Sir Alexander Fleming: A microbiologist at work and play
Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States Sir Alexander Fleming had many talents. His discoveries of lysozyme in 1923 and in 1928 the antibiotic effect of the fungus Penicillium notatum are well known.1 Less well known is that he was a skilled marksman and a member of the London Scottish Regiment during World War I. There is…
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Michel de Montaigne in his circular library
At the age of thirty-eight, in 1571, the aristocratic Michel de Montaigne retired from public life and “servitude at the court” in order to spend in his château “what little remains of his life, now more than half had run out.” He passed the next ten years or so “in the bosom of the learned…