Month: November 2024
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Pietro Grimani: Venetian Doge and Fellow of the Royal Society (1667–1752)
Pietro Grimani was one the most cultured of the 120 Doges who served as chief magistrates and leaders of the city and republic of Venice for more than one thousand years. Born into an ancient aristocratic family that had held essential positions in Venetian society, he had studied the classics as a young man, including…
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Reminiscences of a medical student in Australia
Some years ago a tourist shown the shopping Galleria in Milan asked the guide why the ceiling paintings illustrating the world’s continents did not include Australia. The guide explained that Australia had yet to be invented. She was clearly misinformed in that the British had established the penal colony at Botany Bay some one hundred…
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Whose name is writ in water: Life, serendipity, and fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva
Carol Zapata-WhelanFresno, California, United States “… I guess [the grass] is the handkerchief of the Lord,A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?”—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass I sank down in a padded chair to wait for my routine bone…
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The Turk’s Head Literary Club
Elizabeth SteinhartJMS PearceHull, England We share a fascination for the varied activities, relics, and quirky names of eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries’ gentlemen’s clubs and societies. One of us (ES) recently found the blue plaque of the Turk’s Head Literary Club above a Chinese supermarket in London’s Soho. Distinguished literati, physicians, and scientists were members of such…
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Paul Farmer, MD (1959–2022)
Paul Edward Farmer was an American medical pioneer anthropologist, academician, and physician. He co-founded and was chief strategist of Partners in Health (PIH), an international nonprofit organization that since 1987 has provided health care services, undertaken research, and advocacy on behalf of the poor and sick. Dr. Farmer grew up in Alabama during much of…
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The Art of Medicine is the essence of medical professionalism
Patrick FiddesAustralia The art consists in three things—the disease, the patient, and the physician. The physician is the servant of the art.1 Among the 412 aphorisms in Francis Adam’s Genuine Works Of Hippocrates2 are three that employ the term “Art.” Two have achieved popular acclaim while the third, the “Art of Medicine,” has received fewer…
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Margaret Mead (1901–1978), controversial anthropologist pioneer
Margaret Mead is remembered as one of the most important, though controversial, anthropologists of the twentieth century. She became famous through her classic work Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), in which she described the life and sexual practices of teenagers on two Samoan islands in the South Pacific. Her books were widely read and…
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Faith and symphony: Anton Bruckner’s trials and triumphs
Michael YafiChaden YafiHouston, Texas, United States Immersed in the music, the young composer conducted the orchestra with such fervor that he scarcely noticed that more than half the audience had slipped away. When the symphony came to its final notes, instead of the applause he had hoped for, he was met with jeers and boos.…
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The history of eyeglasses
Efforts to improve vision date back to the ancient civilizations of India and China. Greek scholars such as Ptolemy and Euclid endeavored to understand the physics of light refraction, the mechanisms of lenses, and how their properties can enhance vision and literacy. The Romans magnified the letters they were looking at by placing reading stones…
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James Parsons, physician and linguist (1705–1770)
Born in Devon and educated in Dublin, James Parsons studied medicine in Paris and became doctor of medicine at Rheims in 1736. Appointed physician to the public infirmary of St. Giles in 1738, he began an obstetric practice in London and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy. He studied antiquities, the fine arts, muscular…