Month: November 2023
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Tales of the psychosomatic in the Lyrical Ballads
Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States The year 1800 saw the publication of John Haygarth’s historic pamphlet Of the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body, an inquiry into what we now know as the nocebo and placebo effects. The same year saw the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s…
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Aphorisms from Latham
Peter Mere Latham, born in 1789, was appointed physician to the Middlesex Hospital at the age of 26 and elected fellow of the Royal College of Physicians three years later. He joined St Bartholomew’s in 1827 and became physician extraordinary to Queen Victoria in 1837. His writings, published between 1828 and 1846, have long ranked…
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The Doctors’ Riot of 1788
Matthew TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United States In the wake of the American Revolution, slavery remained a key part of the United States’ economy. Even the northern states were not exempt; in the waning years of the eighteenth century, slaves made up nearly 20% of the population of New York City alone.1 As a 2011 Lancet article…
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The financial affairs of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
After more than 200 years, the music of the great genius Mozart has remained unsurpassed and the interest in various aspects of his life continues unabated. Most medical authorities now believe that he died from Henoch-Schönlein nephritis with severe edema, hypertension, and neurological complications in the form of a stroke.1 There is perhaps less agreement…
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Whale tales: Old and new
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Oh, are you from Wales? Do you know a fella named Jonah? He used to live in whales for a while.”– Groucho Marx The biblical story of the prophet Jonah and the whale is well known. Jonah does not want to accept a mission God has given him. He flees, boards a…
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Wilfred Harris and periodic migrainous neuralgia
JMS PearceHull, England The turn of the twentieth century marked an era when throughout Europe clinical neurology was evolving rapidly as an erudite specialist discipline based mainly on clinicopathological observations and correlations. Its English leaders were John Hughlings Jackson and David Ferrier followed by Henry Charlton Bastian, William Gowers, and Victor Horsley. By the 1920s,…