Month: April 2020
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Epidemic encephalitis lethargica
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Table 1. QUARANTINABLE DISEASES Cholera Diphtheria Infectious tuberculosis Plague Smallpox Yellow fever Viral hemorrhagic fevers Severe acute respiratory syndromes Influenza pandemic From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Legal authorities for isolation and quarantine. Source The pandemic Covid-19 infection, first reported from China in December 2019, reminds us…
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Together, We Are an Ocean
Janet Cai New Brunswick, NJ “Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” – Ryunosuke Satoro Together, the individual cells, lamellae, and glands featured in these paintings contribute to a complete functioning body. There is a kind of beauty about the individuality and unity simultaneously exhibited; as physicians, nurses, social workers,…
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Robert Louis Stevenson and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia
Sally Metzler Chicago, Illinois, USA Fig. 1: Edward Joseph F. Timmons, Stevenson House, ca. 1940, oil on canvas, Collection of the Union League Club Chicago. Famed Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) traveled to Monterey, California, in 1879 and lived for three months on the second floor of a white adobe boarding house called…
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Vaccinating a young child
The entire household has assembled to watch a child being vaccinated against smallpox. Inoculation with material derived from cowpox lesions was still sufficiently novel to excite such interest. It had been first attempted in 1796 by Edward Jenner, who used the term vaccination because the Latin for cow is vacca and cowpox was called vaccinia.…
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“Scarlet letters” — The depiction of scarlet fever in literature
Emily BoyleDublin, Ireland Scarlet fever, named for the erythematous skin rash that may accompany streptococcal infections (Fig 1), is often considered a disease of Victorian times. Associated with high levels of morbidity and mortality (up to 25%) when epidemics were common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the US,1,2 it is seen less…
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Cholera in France 1859
“The scene is the interior of a rough and ready hospital; upon the beds are the poor riches in the throes of agony and death. To the left one raises himself, nude and haggard, and howls with insane vehemence; beside him another grows blue and rigid as a medical attendant hurries to his side with…
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William Harvey before King Charles I
In 1628 William Harvey published his classic work De Motu Cordis (Of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals) demonstrating that the blood passed from the left ventricle to the capillaries at the periphery and back through the veins to the right side of the heart. He received many honors for his work, and…
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St. Francis heals a leper
Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665-1747) was a Bolognese painter nicknamed “the Spanish One” (Lo Spagnuolo) because he wore tight clothes characteristic of the Spanish fashion of the time. In this paining from the Brera, Milan, he shows St. Francis healing a leper by touching the shoulder which presumably had been affected by the disease. Saint Francis…
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Mandarin doctor examines the patient’s pulse
This nineteenth century Mandarin doctor is flouting the traditionally accepted rules of medical examination of inspection, palpation, percussion, and auscultation. He is intently focusing on the patient’s pulse but seems to have omitted the preliminary step of inspection in that he is looking away from his patient instead of looking at her. Spring 2020 |…
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Thomas Addis and his times
Thomas Addis, one of the most prominent students of the kidney during the first half of the twentieth century, was born in Edinburgh in 1881.1-3 Recruited by Stanford Medical School University in 1911, he spent almost his entire academic life there. After a brief interest in hemophilia and bilirubin metabolism, he switched to the study…