A very interesting case
Anjiya Sulaiman The Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan Image by Khan Osama bin Fraz By my fourth year of medical school I had learned to distill patients into a pure clinical form. Individual characteristics are routinely and expertly tweezed and condensed into an intricate framework of pathology, pharmacology, and medical jargon: we call them […]
Informed consent
Charles H. Halsted Davis, California, USA Autopsy at the Hôtel-Dieu (1876) by Henri Gervex Outlined by the glimmer of eastern sun, the head nurse says: “One of your patients passed around four. His body has been sent to the hospital morgue.” You are the intern, first up on the ward to see all the patients ahead […]
Tales out of medical school
Charles H. Halsted Davis, California, USA University of Rochester School of Medicine, 1958 In first-year anatomy class, I shared a rectangular metal table with three other twenty-one-year-old men and our assigned corpse, a blank-eyed, obese, and lifeless white seventyish woman. Half of my classmates were former Eastern prep school boys, the others mostly Jewish […]
Where the sound goes
Kacper Niburski Montreal, Quebec, Canada Image from page 409 of “A practical treatise on medical diagnosis for students and physicians” (1904) There were only a few bodies that I had touched fully before entering medical school: my mother’s as a baby drawn to a life; my twin’s as a faulty mirror; my lovers’ who […]
Beginnings of bedside teaching in Padua: Montanus
“Medical historians seem to agree that the first teacher of medicine to instruct his students at the bedside was Giovanni Batista de Monte (1498-1552), better known by his Latin name of Montanus. In 1543 Montanus was appointed to the Chair of Medicine at the University of Padua, a state institution of the […]
Special abilities for a brave new world
Elida Melova The Republic of Macedonia Miranda – The Tempest, 1916. John William Waterhouse, Oil on Canvas. London, Royal Academy, 1916, no. 52 “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.” – Alan K. Simpson This quote has found its true home in education. Receiving a degree […]
Cultivating clinical compassion with cultural encounters
Jeffrey Lee Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States Sunset along the beaches of Sant Antoni de Calonge The calm waves of the Mediterranean played a lullaby as I walked along the beach, the fine-grained sand gently caressing my toes. I noticed a small group of women massaging each other’s backs. I awkwardly watched them from the […]
In a scan, darkly
Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece Every so often I browse through old patient records and before committing them to the shredder I read through the histories they contain. These visits to the past are useful and edifying, allowing a more detached consideration of the events. Has something changed in medical knowledge since then? Do the […]
Thomas Jefferson’s medical schools
John D. Ehrhardt, Jr. and J. Patrick O’Leary Miami, Florida, United States Portrait of Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States of America, devoted much of his life to science, medicine, and education. Entering the College of William & Mary at sixteen, he was […]
Aequanimitas and apathy
Lee W. Eschenroeder Charlottesville, Virginia Sir William Osler On May 1, 1889, Sir William Osler, one of the greatest clinicians and educators of all time, stood before students at the University of Pennsylvania and delivered the valedictory address “Aequanimitas.” Since that day equanimity, or “imperturbability” as Osler also named it, has become one of […]