Month: May 2020
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African American contract doctors in the military
Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode Island, United States In the spring of 1898, the United States rushed into a war with Spain but lacked adequate troops, training, weapons, transport, supplies, food, landing craft, and medical personnel. One deficit that could be corrected before the shooting started was the lack of doctors. George Sternberg, the Army Surgeon General,…
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Dr. Fanny Halpern, a psychiatric go-between of 1930s Shanghai
Richard ZhangPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States On September 20, 1935, a lengthy advertisement in one of Shanghai’s most popular newspapers, the Shen Bao, celebrated the recent opening of the Shanghai Puci Sanatorium (上海普濨療養院).1 The sanatorium would later be known in Western histories as The Mercy Hospital for Nervous Diseases. The advertisement lauded the Puci Sanatorium, headed…
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The times of Gaspare Tagliacozzi, founder of plastic surgery
In his essay on Giovanni Battista Cortesi, recently reviewed in this Journal, Dr. Paolo Savoia refers to other surgeons who achieved prominence in sixteenth-century Italy. In medicine, as in the arts, progress had been abetted by an influx of Greek scholars from Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. In Western Europe,…
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The search for Eisenhower’s adrenal tumor
Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, United States For most Americans, the knowledge of Dwight Eisenhower’s health history is limited to the fact that he had a serious heart attack while president. However, a seemingly casual comment by a non-physician political scientist, Robert E. Gilbert, in his book The Mortal Presidency: Illness and Anguish in the White…
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Ophthalmology in Regency era China: A portrait of Thomas Richardson Colledge by George Chinnery
Stephen MartinThailand Thomas Richardson Colledge (1797-1879) was an ophthalmic surgeon who practiced in Macao, China, for a quarter of a century in the late Regency era. Colledge’s daughter, Frances Mary Martin (1847-1918) wrote a brief biography of him in 1880.1 It is an absorbing and touching account, and important in relation to an extraordinary medical…
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The Schoolhouse Lab
Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode Island, United States “Black measles” was a common name for spotted fever, which regularly killed people in the western United States. Symptoms included a spotty rash on the extremities, fever, chills, headache, and photophobia. No one knew what caused it. The first recorded case in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley was in 1873.1 Twenty-three…