Category: Physicians of Note
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John Ruhräh, poliomyelitis pioneer and medical historian
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel “The best sailors are those who have studied the charts and records of those who have sailed before.” – John Ruhräh John Ruhräh was a pediatrician and medical historian born to German parents in Chillicothe, Ohio, on September 26, 1872. After completing medical studies at the College of Physicians and Surgeons…
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Samuel Auguste Andre David Tissot (1728–1797)
JMS PearceHull, England The Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Andre David Tissot (1728–1797)*1,2 (Fig 1) spent his professional life in Lausanne, despite tempting offers made by the royalties of Poland and England. He developed into one of the most influential physicians of the Age of Enlightenment: an advocate of rational medicine as opposed to the prevailing…
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John Morgan, founder of public medical education in America
John Morgan was born in 1735, grandson of David Morgan, a Quaker who emigrated to America from Wales around the year 1700. His father was Evan Morgan, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who lived at the corner of Market and Second Streets and was a friend and neighbor of Benjamin Franklin. After attending a school of…
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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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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,…
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Dr. William Shippen, surgeon and educator in colonial America
William Shippen Jr. (1736–1808) was a prominent medical person in early American history. Born in Philadelphia in 1736, he came from a well-connected family and received his training at the University of Edinburgh, at the time considered the best medical school in the English-speaking world. He returned to Philadelphia in 1762, and with John Morgan…
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John Allan Wyeth
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel The 1952 book The Scalpel, the Sword by Ted Allen and Sydney Gordon is the story of Dr. Norman Bethune (1890–1939), a Canadian chest surgeon who made important contributions in the fight against pulmonary tuberculosis, as well as surgical contributions to China during the war with Japan. However, there is a book with a…
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Theodor Zwinger (1533–1588)
To the twentieth century tourist, the name Zwinger brings to mind the beautiful palace built in Dresden in 1709 by King Augustus the Strong of Saxony. In German, Zwinger means an open area between two surrounding walls built to defend a city. But none of these have anything to do with Theodor Zwinger. He was…
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Thomas Dover, physician and entrepreneur (1660–1742)
Oh, Dover was a pirate and he sailed the Spanish MainA hacking cough convulsed him and he had agonizing pain.So he mixed himself a powder, which he liked more and more.Ipecac and opium and K2SO4 1 Thomas Dover was an English physician who in 1732 invented a patent medicine known as “Dover’s Powder.” It consisted…
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Down’s syndrome
JMS PearceHull, England Amongst the residents he attended at Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Redhill, Surrey, John Langdon Down in 1865 began to use an anthropological classification. He identified a group of patients who were mentally delayed and showed a remarkably similar, but previously unrecognized distinctive facial appearance that he described using the language of…