Month: March 2023
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Can headless martyrs really walk? The belief in cephalophores in the Middle Ages
Andrew WodrichWashington, DC “By the temple of Mercury, [he was] beheaded with [an] axe. And anon the body of St. Denis raised himself up, and bare his head between his arms, as the angel led him two leagues … unto the place where he now resteth, by his election, and by the purveyance of God.”1…
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Ruggero Oddi: Brilliant physician and victim of gaslighting by the Congo Free State
Eli EhrenpreisSkokie, Illinois, United States When Ruggero Oddi (1864–1913) was a medical student at the University of Bologna, he performed studies detailing the physiology of the biliary sphincter. This work became Oddi’s legacy, setting the stage for modern biliary and pancreatic clinical science. Without Oddi’s research, we would not have reached our current state-of-the-art in…
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A brief history of ulcerative colitis
Parnita KesarSouth Carolina, United States The symptoms of ulcerative colitis have been documented since the eighteenth century. From 1745, there is evidence that Prince Charles, the Young Pretender to the English crown, had symptoms consistent with the condition we now know as ulcerative colitis. He treated these symptoms by adopting a milk-free diet.1 But the…
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Abraham de Balmes ben Meir, Jewish Italian physician and polymath
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Abraham de Balmes ben Meir (c. 1460–1523) was a Jewish physician and polymath from the baroque Italian city of Lecce in the south of Italy, where his grandfather had served as personal physician to King Ferdinand I of Naples. He studied medicine in Naples but left in 1510 when Jewish people…
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King Wamba’s poisoning with cytisine
Nicolas Roberto RoblesBadajoz, Spain In AD 409, the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by the Suevi and the Vandals (of Germanic stock) and the Alans (of Asian origin). The Visigoths came next. They had entered into an alliance with imperial Rome with the purpose of ejecting these invaders from Iberia, and after several years of warfare,…
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Conflict about the clitoris: Colombo versus Fallopio
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”– Oscar Wilde The clitoris, a female genital structure anatomically homologous to the penis, was known to the ancients. In 540 BC, the Greek Hipponax made one of the earliest references to it. It was not mentioned by Hippocrates,1 but Arabic, Persian, and Roman writers…
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Books, bangles, and bravado
Jill KarNew Delhi, India Anandibai Joshee (Anandi) set sail from India at the age of eighteen. Bartering her bangles for books, she traded convention for an education, which was considered shameful in nineteenth-century India.1 In doing so, she was the first Indian woman to become a physician (Fig. 1). Born to a traditional Hindu Brahmin…
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A time to live and a time to die
Amera HassanMinneapolis, Minnesota “Well to be honest, doc, I don’t quite care whether I do live or die.” He said it so nonchalantly and he was smiling too, a crow-footed wrinkle on either side of his eyes. When this patient was first admitted to the floor, he was in an undignified state, with flies wafting…
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Sea sick: Naval surgery and sanitation in eighteenth-century Britain
Melissa YeoOntario, Canada Scurvy, yellow fever, and typhus were considered “the three Great Killers of seamen.”1 Hygiene and diet were very poor aboard eighteenth-century sailing vessels, as ships were often overstocked with men to account for ensuing losses while at sea.2 The sanitation on board these ships was considered as bad or worse than the slums…