Month: November 2023
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The problem with drinking (water) on airplanes
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink.”– The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) In the year 2020, 4.5 billion people flew on commercial aircraft. The previous year saw US airlines carry over 900 million passengers, and only 13% of Americans had never flown on a plane.1 Water is…
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John Morgan, founder of public medical education in America
John Morgan was born in 1735, grandson of David Morgan, a Quaker who emigrated to America from Wales around the year 1700. His father was Evan Morgan, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who lived at the corner of Market and Second Streets and was a friend and neighbor of Benjamin Franklin. After attending a school of…
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ReJoycing in words and medicine
Fergus ShanahanCork, IrelandEamonn QuigleyHouston, Texas, United States Making mejical history all over the show!-James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (FW) 514.2-31 James Joyce (1882–1941) is celebrated for his portrayal of the lives of ordinary people in his native city. Like many of the great writers, he had a lot to say about illness and disease. He was…
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Important figures in the history of neuropsychiatry
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel The life of William Alwyn Lishman (1931–2021) was dedicated to neuropsychiatry.1-2 His classic textbook, Organic Psychiatry (1978), is a foundational book for neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and physiatrists. Lishman was the first UK professor of neuropsychiatry whose “abiding message was that neuropsychiatry was not a subspecialty but the whole of psychiatry—biopsychosocial—with the…
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Tobacco: Dr. Monardes’ miracle cure
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “[Tobacco] is an hearb of great affirmation for the excellent vertues that it hath.”1– Nicolás Monardes, MD (translated by John Frampton, 1577) “A custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs…”2– James I of England, 1604 Nicolás Monardes (1493–1588) earned his bachelor’s degree…
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The name of gratitude
Giulio NicitaFlorence, Italy Florence was covered in a blanket of snow. Only three patients were sitting in Guido’s waiting room. Others had canceled because of the weather. A young pregnant woman waited with her husband and was soon ushered into the office. When the couple was seated at the doctor’s desk, he asked the woman…
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Love thy neighbour?: Peace-loving primates
JMS PearceHull, England One of the greatest mysteries about human beings is the contrast between their intelligence, inventiveness, creativity and their extraordinary compulsion for self-destruction and violence. How can humans, blessed with compassion, charity and sympathy, combined with knowledge, self–awareness and understanding, so readily embrace acts of violence, destruction of ourselves both individually and collectively?…
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Röntgen’s birthplace
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom November 8th is World Radiology Day and celebrates the discovery of X-rays by Röntgen, who was a fifty-year-old relatively unknown physics professor at the University of Wurzburg in 1895 when he made his important discovery. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born on 11 March 1845 in the house shown in the…
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“A conspicuous place in the annals of murder”: The anatomy murders of Burke and Hare
Matthew TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United States In 1828 Scotland, two men committed a series of crimes that would earn them, as a contemporary newspaper described, “a conspicuous place in the annals of murder.”1 To both contemporaries and modern audiences, the gruesome story of Burke and Hare is “an endless source of morbid fascination.”1 For centuries, Western…