Month: September 2021
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Catching Your Death: Infectious rain in the works of Jane Austen
Eve Elliot Dublin, Ireland Willoughby Carries Marianne Home. Image: Carried Her Down the Hill, 1908. By C.E Brock. Wikimedia Commons. Fans of the Netflix romp Bridgerton or any of the Jane Austen film adaptations will likely be familiar with the important social etiquette of inquiring after someone’s health. Unlike the modern throwaway how are…
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Mental hospital memories of another era
Robert Craig Brisbane, Queensland, Australia The former St. Audry’s Hospital. Photo by Adrian S Pye. CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1964, having obtained a place to study medicine at Cambridge University, I was given the opportunity as a medical student to work as an assistant nurse for three months in a large residential mental hospital…
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The talented Dr. Cotton and other quacks
Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States Portrait of Henry Andrews Cotton from Appleton’s Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1924. Via Wikimedia. Over the centuries there has been a surfeit of talented medical quacks in all parts of the world. The word “quack,” indeed, is derived from the archaic Dutch word “quacksalver,” meaning “boaster who…
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Review: The History of the World in 100 Pandemics, Plagues and Epidemics
Arpan Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom Cover: The History of the World in 100 pandemics, plagues and epidemics. The publication of this book could not have been better timed. The book sets out to show how pandemics, epidemics, and infectious diseases have shaped human history over the last 5,000 years. Its contents help us place…
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Did Ernest Hemingway have the Celtic curse?
Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1954. GPA Photo Archive. Via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0 Considering Ernest Hemingway’s mishaps before he died in 1961 by a self-inflicted shotgun wound, it is surprising that he lived so long. He survived two plane crashes several days apart that left…
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Reconstructing memories and history in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Tonse N.K. RajuGaithersburg, Maryland, United States “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” In the opening sentence of his extraordinary masterpiece, Gabriel García Márquez distilled the recurring themes of One Hundred Years of Solitude1: the absurdity…
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The Pearl of the Orient: the persistence of Dr. Wu Lien-teh
Ku Ezriq Raif bin Ku Besry Perlis, Malaysia Dr. Wu Lien-teh 1935. Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain. The work of Wu Lien-teh in controlling the 1910 Manchurian Plague has been celebrated as “a milestone in the systematic practice of epidemiological principles in disease control.” The cloth face mask he developed, “the principal means of personal protection”1…
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A drawing created during World War I
Tilman Sauerbruch Bonn, Germany Fig 1. Portrait-drawing of the of the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch by Max Beckmann 1915 at the frontline during World War I (private collection). A photograph of a drawing by Max Beckmann (1884-1950) of the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch (1875-1951) has been hanging in my room since my student days (Fig. 1).…