Month: February 2022
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Nikolai Medtner: his forgotten melodies, music, and life
Michael YafiHouston, Texas, United States The music of Nikolai Medtner (1880 -1951) is among the most enigmatic of the piano repertoire. Medtner was an opinionated composer who admired Rachmaninoff and rejected all attempts at modernism in music. Rachmaninoff met Medtner in Russia and the two composers had a mutual admiration for one another. Rachmaninoff told…
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William Withering’s botanical microscope
JMS PearceEast Yorks, Hull, England William Withering (1741-1799) (Fig 1) made several important contributions to medicine and science other than his well-known discovery of the medicinal value of the foxglove (Digitalis purpurea). Digitalis1 and diuretics were the lynchpins of treatment for edema and congestive heart failure until the 1990s. Withering found that if he used…
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“The trial” of Dr. Spock
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.”1— Rudolf Virchow, M.D. (1821-1902) “It took me until my sixties to realize that politics was a part of pediatrics.”2— Benjamin Spock, M.D. Benjamin McLane Spock (1903-1998) was an American pediatrician and author of Baby and Child…
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Samuel Johnson: “The great convulsionary”
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom This paper reproduces in an abridged form an earlier article by its author1 appraising the evidence that Samuel Johnson suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. Several authors have commented on the many eccentricities of Dr. Samuel Johnson (Fig 1).2 Thomas Tyers, for example, has written as follows: His gestures, which were a…
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Love as illness: Symptomatology
Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Is love a disease? I mean erotic, obsessive, knees-a-trembling, passionate love. This is a question on which philosophers have descanted interminably. So have anthropologists, physicians, poets, and, in short, all those who suffer what Juvenal called insanabile cacoethes scribendi1 (“the incurable mania of writing”). All these have set forth their…
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Wedding anniversary
Paul RousseauCharleston, South Carolina, United States Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned…— W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming It is their tenth wedding anniversary. They are traveling to a restaurant on a black, moonless night. They round a curve as a semi-trailer truck veers across the center line.…
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Happy hypoxia
Khyati GuptaMumbai, India Poet’s statement “Happy hypoxia” is a poem I wrote while trying to capture the thoughts of a patient in solitude infected with coronavirus amidst the second wave of the pandemic. Happy hypoxia I wake up at the noise of a tray put next to my bedI know what’s in it even before…
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Movie review: The Hospital, “the wounded madhouse of our times”
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Where do you train your nurses, Mrs. Christie, Dachau?”— Dr. Herbert Bock, The Hospital The Hospital (1971) is a devastating satire about American medicine in the second half of the twentieth century. We see the functioning of an inner-city teaching hospital through the eyes of Dr. Herbert Bock (played by George C.…
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A detailed depiction of a “crime scene” circa 1455
Daniel GelfmanIndianapolis, Indiana, United States The use of forensic science to determine the etiology and manner of death has been attempted for millennia. Early autopsies involved inspection of the deceased individual and possibly an internal examination. The performance of autopsies has been greatly influenced by religious and political forces.1 There is a record of the…