Avi Ohry
Tel Aviv, Israel

In Ezekiel 1:4-28 there is a reference to a big cloud with a strong wind and fire flashing from it. Inside the cloud, four wheels touched the ground, and all the wheels looked as if they were made from a clear, yellow jewel.1
Various museums, such as the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, display models of old eighteenth-century horse-drawn carriages in which doctors traveled to visit their patients.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted his father, who was a great lover of horses. The painting is called Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa Driving his Mail-Coach in Nice.2
The French psychiatrist Philipp Pinel described in a 1798 treatise how the great philosopher Blaise Pascal almost drowned in the Seine when the horses drawing his carriage bolted. He later had recurring dreams of a precipice on his left side and would place a chair there to prevent him from falling off his bed.3
The German mathematician-astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) attended a horse-carriage ceremony opening the new railway line to Cassel. The horses were frightened by the train’s noise; the carriage turned over, and the driver was terribly wounded. Gauss was physically unhurt but later became a hypochondriac as well developing sudden deafness and cardiac insufficiency.4
Napoleon’s chief surgeon, Dominique Jean Larrey (1766–1842), the father of modern military surgery, invented and initiated the safe evacuation of wounded soldiers from the battlefield to the rear hospitals. His “flying ambulances” (ambulance volante) were mainly horse carriages.5
Thomas Hodgkin (1798–1866) of Hodgkin’s disease held radical political views, promoted the education of working-class men, and became a founding member of the Senate of the University of London in 1836. He was concerned about the effects of colonization on Indigenous cultures. This led to his arriving at Guy’s in a carriage “with a half-naked native American,” much to the displeasure of Benjamin Harrison, the treasurer of Guy’s. It was perhaps because of this incident in 1837 that Hodgkin failed to win an appointment to the permanent clinical staff of Guy’s.6
The famous charlatan Latan traveled about Paris in a splendid early type of carriage called a charabanc, in which he had a traveling dispensary. A man with a horn announced his approach, and the delighted sightseers used to cry out “Voila le Char de Latan!“7
Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary symbolized the neurotic woman, Emma, making love behind drawn shades in a hackney carriage circling round and round Rouen to the bewilderment of onlookers.
One of Professor Jean-Martin Charcot’s patients (1825–1893) is remembered as “the lady in the carriage,” a title drawn from Charcot’s description of her symptoms and from the associated photographs that captured static moments of her frenzied and compulsive dance.8
The Dutch pediatrician professors Simon van Creveld (1894–1971) and Richard Ellis, while meeting fortuitously in a railway carriage on the way to a medical congress, realized that they were both about to publish an account of the same disorder. They agreed to publish it jointly, with Ellis listed first for the sake of euphony and by his alphabetical precedence.9
In 1832, the famous French anatomist and orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Jacques Mathieu Delpech, was shot dead by a patient he had operated on for varicocele as he was riding back to Montpellier in an open carriage.
The famous Austrian pianist Henri Herz (1806–1888) accompanied the violinist Lafont on a tour of Germany, Holland, and France. The tour came tragically to an end when Lafont was thrown out of his carriage and instantly killed.
References
- Encyclopedia Britannica. www.britannica.com
- De Toulouse-Lautrec, H. Alphonse De Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa (1838-1913) Driving His Mail-Coach in Nice, 1881. Allposters. http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Alphonse-De-Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa-1838-1913-Driving-His-Mail-Coach-in-Nice-1881-Posters_i1348732_.htm
- Crocq, MA and Crocq, L. Du shell shock et de la névrose de guerre à l’état de stress post-traumatique: une histoire de la psychotraumatologie [From shell shock and war neurosis to posttraumatic stress disorder: a history of psychotraumatology]. Dialogues Clin Neurosci 2000 Mar 2(1):47-55.
- Burch, GE. Carl Friedrich Gauss, a genius who apparently died of arteriosclerotic heart disease and congestive heart failure. AMA Arch Intern Med 1958 ;101(4):824-34.
- Brewer, LA 3rd. Baron Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842). Father of modern military surgery, innovator, humanist. J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 1986 ;92(6):1096-8.
- Warren, P. Thomas Hodgkin. 1798-1866. Health advocate for Manitoba. Clin Invest Med (Can.), 2007;30(4) suppl. http://cimonline.ca/index.php/cim/article/view/2799
- Ohry, A and Tsafrir, J. Running after quacks and mountebanks. Progress in Health Sciences 2012;2(1):171-4.
- Simon van Creveld. WhoNamedIt? https://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/794.html
AVI OHRY, MD, is married with two daughters. He is Emeritus Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at Tel Aviv University, the former director of Rehabilitation Medicine at Reuth Medical and Rehabilitation Center in Tel Aviv, and a member of The Lancet‘s Commission on Medicine & the Holocaust. He conducts award-winning research in neurological rehabilitation, bioethics, medical humanities and history, and on long-term effects of disability and captivity. He plays the drums with three jazz bands.
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