Month: January 2023
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Book review: My Years with the British Red Cross
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The Red Cross is known worldwide as a great humanitarian achievement. The charity was founded by Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, who was moved by the lack of care available to people who had been wounded in the Battle of Solferino, Italy, in 1859. His idea was to produce national societies…
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Book review: The Soul of Medicine: Tales from the Bedside
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Life is short, and the art long; the occasion fleeting, experience fallacious, and judgment difficult.”—Hippocrates The Soul of Medicine is a slender (200-page) book by surgeon-author Sherwin B. Nuland. It contains twenty-one essays, each one based on a “tale” told to Nuland by either a medical student (one), or by physicians in…
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Body language: The history of medical terminology
Eve ElliotDublin, Ireland “We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.“—James D. Nicoll As any student of life sciences will tell you, medical terminology can feel like a foreign language. Fossae and foramina, erythropoietin and encephalomalacia, atelectasis and…
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Amy Sage
Eli EhrenpreisChicago, Illinois, United States During my medical training in the 90s, Amy Sage was a real standout. She was a fellow in the gastroenterology program at the university hospital. She was tall, muscular, and had blonde hair. She had quite a presence at work, parking her motorcycle on the street near the hospital, walking…
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The mysterious illness of Christopher Columbus
It is well known that Christopher Columbus left Spain in 1492 and sailed westward on three small ships, the Santa María, Niña, and Pinta, in search of a northwest passage to the East Indies. It is perhaps less well known that during the greater part of his expeditions, he suffered from an incapacitating illness that…
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Pierre Charles Louis of the numerical method
Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872) was a physician and epidemiologist who made significant contributions to medicine. He worked on the transmission of infectious diseases and developed the concept of “therapeutic nihilism” in the treatment of disease. Louis grew up during the French Revolution, studied medicine in Reims and Paris, and received his medical degree in…
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Sir Norman Gregg and the German measles
Sir Norman Gregg was an Australian eye doctor who in 1941 noticed that some mothers suffering from rubella during pregnancy had babies with severe eye abnormalities. Born in 1892 in Burwood, a suburb of Sydney, Gregg studied medicine at the University of Sydney, played cricket and tennis for the state of New South Wales, and…
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Marc Ruffer, founder of paleopathology
Sir Marc Armand Ruffer (1859–1917) is considered the founder of paleopathology, the study of disease in human remains. He was born in Lyons, France, the son of Swiss banker Baron Jacques de Ruffer and a German mother. He was educated in Germany and France, Oxford and London, and worked for a short time on rabies…
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More on Arthur Aufderheide, the mummy doctor (1922–2013)
Arthur C. Aufderheide (1922–2013) received his undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1943 and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1952. After completing his education, he became a professor at the University of Minnesota in Duluth and spent most of his active life there. Aufderheide’s major contribution to anthropology…