Category: Vignettes at Large
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A Martian treatment for dehydration
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden I was “rotating” through the pediatric service in an American general hospital. As a sixth-year student of a European medical school, I had been allowed to return home for my year of clinical duties before graduation. One day, during pediatric rounds, a resident presented an infant who had been admitted because of…
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The curative value of pork
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.— Voltaire My mother told me the story that when I was a few months old I developed some sort of respiratory illness. The problem distressed my parents so much that they called the family doctor to our apartment.…
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A circle of hip surgery around four continents
Peter ArnoldSydney, Australia My story begins in Sydney in late January 1980. A businessman in his mid-fifties (Mr. C.) had been on his way to source products in the UK. As his student son was traveling in Italy, he decided to visit him by stopping over in Rome on his way north. When the young…
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The sweet smell of success
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “You shall nose him . . .”— Hamlet, Act IV, scene III It was July 1977. After having done a rotating internship, I was starting my pediatric residency at the academic children’s hospital. My first rotation was in the outpatient clinic, an old, run-down building a few blocks from the main hospital.…
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Why do physicians write so badly?
Peter ArnoldSydney, Australia An old joke is that pharmacists are the only people who can read physicians’ handwriting. This piece is not about handwriting, but about writing style. Compared with great medical authors, like Somerset Maugham, Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov, John Keats, and Friedrich von Schiller, most physicians are not good writers. (I could have…
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The two doctors
In the crowded center of an ancient city with churches and minarets, with fragrant spices and fluttering chickens for sale, there practiced two friends who finished medical school in the same year. The one who had graduated at the bottom of the class had a huge practice. The one who came first had very few…
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The old ice box
A popular doctor once had in his office an old icebox that had long ceased to fulfill the function for which it had been created. It was disconnected from electrical power but spacious enough to allow a person to sit in it. The physician would tell his worried, well patients that this was an X-ray…
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The last iron lungs
Charles HalstedDavis, California, United States In the springtime of my internship year, I rotated onto the polio ward where I learned that poliomyelitis could kill by paralyzing the muscles of breathing. Eight years before, Salk had shown that injection of his vaccine of inactive virus could prevent polio about half the time. By nineteen sixty,…
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Our celiac boarder
Charles HalstedDavis, California, United States I listened with care to her history of weight loss, grain aversion, abdominal cramps, and frequent diarrhea. Her great-grandfather was an early California settler who had experienced the same symptoms for many years before he died. My patient, now in the middle years of her life, appeared normal, except for…