Month: June 2022
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Book review: The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis Gets Us Wrong
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Making the right diagnosis is central to the medical encounter. A doctor always started off by taking a history, examining the patient, and sometimes performing additional tests. But when a creditable diagnosis could not be made, the medical profession often invented conditions that later were shown not to exist. Such…
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Beans: an indelicate subject of conversation
Anatomy books describe kidneys as bean shaped, but the converse does not apply. This is because beans, multitudinous in their species, come in different shapes and sizes. Many look like small kidneys, but only one is called a kidney bean.1,2 Like their cousins lentils and peas, beans are the dried seeds of the flowering plants…
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Diagnosis: Neurosyphilis. Treatment: Malaria, iatrogenic
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The syphilitic man was thinking hard…about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street. Here was his problem: His brains, where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive by corkscrews.”– Kurt Vonnegut, The Breakfast of Champions Julius Wagner-Jauregg, M.D. (1857–1940) graduated…
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Ladies in hats
Alan BlumTuscaloosa, Alabama, United States I was encouraging an overweight patient in patent leather shoes with two-inch heels to start wearing sneakers instead, when she calmly reached into her totebag and pulled out a pair of Nikes. The pumps, she explained, were her “comin’-to-the-doctor shoes.” Her finest footwear was a sign of respect. Hats, too,…
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A tale of three doctors
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “How true it is that it is difficult to benefit mankind without some unpleasantness resulting for oneself.”– Dr. Edme-Claude Bourru, giving Dr. Guillotin’s eulogy Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, M.D. (1738–1814) was an ex-Jesuit priest, a practicing physician, and a politician just before and during the French Revolution.1,2 He was an opponent of capital punishment…
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Garlic in medicine and at dinner
Garlic (Allium sativum) is a bulbous flowering plant that belongs to the same genus as onions, shallots, chives, and leeks. Its bulbous part consists of 65% water, carbohydrates, organosulfur compounds, protein, and free amino acids. It also produces a substance called allicin which gives it its characteristic smell. Since the dawn of history, garlic has…
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Early surgery of meningocele
JMS PearceHull, England A variety of dysraphic states, recorded since antiquity, (Fig 1)1 are caused by the failed closure of the neural tube during the fourth week of embryonic life. They include hydrocephalus, Chiari malformations, and various types of spina bifida with meningocele or meningomyelocele. Nicolaes Tulp (1593–1674)—subject of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson—in Observationes Medicae…