Month: January 2022
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In Aristotle’s footsteps
Henri ColtLaguna Beach, California, United States Squatting on a cement slab, the old doctor watched sea urchins bristle their spines in clear Aegean waters. His short brown tunic covered shoulders broad as an oxen’s chest. He flexed his tanned, muscular forearms and clenched his fists, then rolled his cotton trousers up to his knees and…
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Drama in brief
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Four years earlier I had had the sad duty to announce her debut as a protagonist on the stage of cancer. Now I was witnessing the last act. She came to the first visit with her elder sister, an old acquaintance from our student days and close friend of my sister’s. She…
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Guaiac and “the old Guaiacum test”
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States “The old Guaiacum test was very clumsy and uncertain.”— A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887 So declares Mr. Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel A Study in Scarlet, first published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887, and then as a book in July 1888 published by Ward,…
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Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 Feb 1473 in the Prussian town of Torun, now part of Poland. He studied at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, and although his main subjects were mathematics and astronomy, he also immersed himself in philosophy and read the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Euclid.…
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“It would be like I never existed”: two minutes with manic psychosis, 1978
Paul RousseauCharleston, South Carolina, United States Foreword Mental illness is often marginalized by non-psychiatric clinicians, yet it causes as much suffering, if not more, than physical illness. I was a medical student completing a rotation in psychiatry when I observed the encounter described here. The patient had visited several community clinics and received little treatment…
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Rabbit starvation (protein poisoning)
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Jack Sprat could eat no fat,his wife could eat no lean…“— Sixteenth-century nursery rhyme Rabbit starvation (fat starvation, mal de caribou, protein poisoning) is an acute type of malnutrition that develops from a diet deficient in fat and where nearly all calories come from lean meat. Rabbit meat is very lean, as…
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When the FBI investigated William Carlos Williams
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “And my ‘medicine’ was the thing that gained me entrance to…[the] secret garden of the self…I was permitted by my medical badge to follow the poor, defeated body onto those gulfs and grottos[sic].”1— William Carlos Williams, M.D. William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963), poet and physician, was born in Rutherford, New Jersey,…
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Dr. Dominique Larrey
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842), the orphaned son of a shoemaker, was raised by an uncle who was a surgeon and became a physician himself by the age of twenty-one. He gave medical assistance to those who stormed the Bastille and supported the French Revolution. In the first war waged against republican France,…
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The Grand Army and horsemeat
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “An army travels on its stomach.” — Attributed to Napoleon Out of all of the innovations of Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842), one has yet to be properly appreciated. In his own words, “I have very often, and with the greatest success given horseflesh to our soldiers and the wounded of our armies…[I]t…