Month: September 2021
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Under the lime tree: Medicine, poetry, and the education of the senses
Alan BleakleySennen, West Cornwall, United Kingdom When in the summer of 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s wife Sara accidentally spilled hot milk over his foot, causing serious burns such that Coleridge could not walk, he sat in the garden of his friend Thomas Poole’s house under a lime tree, immobilized. A party of friends, meanwhile, had…
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Learning the meaning of love
Charlotte EliopoulosGlen Arm, Maryland, United States In the summer before my senior year in high school, I spent my vacation as a candy striper. In the sixties, this was an opportunity for young girls interested in nursing to serve as hospital volunteers and gain some insight into their career of choice. Being young and naïve—and…
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Airs and graces: Humphry Davy and science as performance
Alan BleakleySennen, West Cornwall, United Kingdom The setting is 1799 in Clifton, Bristol, in the southwest of England; and there is something important in the air. A “Pneumatic Institute” has been set up to investigate the potential uses of newly isolated gases such as nitrous oxide in medicine. Humphry Davy, a young, ambitious scientist from…
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Medicine and cinema—A cultural symbiosis
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom For doctors and lovers of cinema, 1895 was an important year. On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a fifty-year-old professor of physics, discovered X-rays in his laboratory in Wurzburg, Germany. On March 22 1895, the Lumiere brothers presented the first film on a screen to an audience of 200 in…
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The invisible manager
Javishkar ReddyJohannesburg, South Africa When I was twelve, I was hit on the head by a cricket ball. A few days later, I had my first seizure. Over the years, I have had many attacks, which have resulted in three chipped teeth, a cracked skull, a dislocated shoulder, and my tongue bitten several times. A…
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“An ounce of prevention”: past and present
Jack E. RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States Donald R. NewcomerGlendale, Arizona, United States Being old and lame of my Hands, and thereby uncapable of assisting my Fellow Citizens, when their Houses are on Fire; I must beg them to take in good Part the following Hints . . . In the first Place, as an…
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Pediatrics and theatrics
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden 1. Initiation. I had had a busy night on call in the city’s largest women’s hospital. I was a second-year pediatric resident assigned to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. My pager went off while I was in the hospital cafeteria. I called the unit, and one of the fellows told me that…
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Lucrezia Borgia—victim of her times
George DuneaChicago, IL For five hundred years, society has unfairly blackened the name of Lucrezia Borgia—in history, literature, even in opera. Living at a time when girls could be disposed of at their parents’ whim, she became a child-bride at eleven, was contracted to be married five times, had a least ten pregnancies, and died…
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When Darwin was wrong
John HaymanVictoria, Australia Charles Darwin (1809–1802) is rightly famous, not for the discovery of evolution but for revealing the mechanism by which it may occur, natural selection. He not only formulated this idea, but he also presented evidence to support it and put it forward in a readily understood manner that could be comprehended by…