Category: Moments in History
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Saul Farber on St. Helena
Peter BerczellerDordogne, France I went to see Saul Farber in his new office in the spring of 2000. For some forty years he had been our chief, our role model, the long-term creative force behind the department of medicine and indeed the entire medical school, the man who personified the core values of our institution.…
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Percussion of the chest: Leopold Auenbrugger
Percussion for examination of the chest was first described in 1754 in a little book written in Latin as “a new discovery that enables the physician from the percussion of the human thorax to detect the diseases hidden within the chest.” At publication the book was ignored and percussion received little attention until popularized decades…
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The most loathsome disease of the emperor Galerius
“His disease was occasioned by a very painful lingering disorder. His body, swelled by an intemperate course of life to an unwieldy corpulence, was covered with ulcers, and devoured by innumerable swarms of those insects who have given the name to a most loathsome disease.” — Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman…
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Isidor Snapper: A colorful but tyrannical chief
The great professor of medicine with the Charles Boyer accent would make ward rounds followed by some thirty students living in constant fear of being publicly humiliated. “You,” he would say, “where do you come from?”—and wherever it was he would then pronounce that “in the country of the blind the one eyed man is…
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Edward Jenner and the dairymaid
Smallpox has plagued mankind since time immemorial, causing huge epidemics with great loss of life and often changing the course of history. The disease could be prevented or ameliorated by variolation, the subcutaneous inoculation with fluid from smallpox lesions into non-immune individuals. Variolation had been used for centuries, even for members of royal families. It…
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Healthcare for the popes
Guy de Chauliac was the personal physician of three of the seven popes forced to reside in Avignon during their so-called Babylonian captivity. Although he wrote a famous textbook on surgery, he practiced mainly as a physician, and reportedly wielded the knife mainly to embalm the bodies of dead popes but was careful to avoid…
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Doctor bites policeman in Chicago religious dispute
The episode took place in Chicago about half a century ago. At the time some 100,000 Ukrainians lived in the greater Chicago area, mostly in a near-west neighborhood referred to as the Ukrainian village. They were mostly (c.70%) Catholics of the Byzantine or Eastern rite, adhering to the old Julian calendar and celebrating Christmas and…
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The King’s-Evil and sensory experience in Richard Wiseman’s Severall Chirurgicall Treatises
Adam KomorowskiSang SongIreland Throughout many centuries, the monarchs of England maintained as royal prerogative the ability to heal the sick by virtue of their miraculous touch alone. William of Malmesbury (c.1090-c.1143) first described the use of the thaumaturgic touch by King Edward the Confessor (1003-66), who healed a woman afflicted with scrofula.1,2,3 While this power…
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A Norse and Dutch friendship
Jan VerhaveNetherlands The renowned pathologist Ludvig Hektoen maintained a vast correspondence with many people.1 The science writer Paul de Kruif was one of them. Their contacts started in 1925. Paul de Kruif was in trouble. In 1922, he had written a story on vaccines in Hearst’s International Magazine where he had accused the manufacturer of…